…or “how to go from Zero to StepMania in one honking big download”.

This process is optimised for the following common case: an i386-based installation of Linux with no prior StepMania software or songs. This download will supply you with the StepMania 3.9 software, 98 songs (the “StepMix #1” collection), and some added chrome (backgrounds, announcers, etc.). The bad news is that it’s a 305MB download, but if this magnitude of data doesn’t deter you, then it’s all good!

Bear in mind that hardware-accelerated OpenGL is a must for StepMania. Your graphics card and drivers must support OpenGL direct rendering, or StepMania will refuse to run. Try PyDance instead if your hardware doesn’t meet this requirement.

To get started with StepMania, download the following “quickstart” file.

This file will un-tar into a directory called “StepMania-3.9”, and will have songs and other extras pre-installed in “StepMania-3.9/Packages”. See the page “Linux StepMania Installation Hints” for suggestions as to where you can install it, notes about the necessary support libraries, and information on running it smoothly. There’s also a summarised install guide in the file “StepMania-3.9/README-TFBW.html” inside the archive itself.

Licensing requirements dictate that I must also provide the source code to StepMania. For that, see the page “Building StepMania for Linux”.