I finished integrating Stephane’s timer patch into the development
branch of SDL - actually I ended up rewriting it so that all platforms
now use a threaded timer by default, and if events are being polled in a
separate thread, that thread will also perform the timer work. I
haven’t tested any of the new code, but hopefully we’ll have no more
problems with SIGALRM. The old Linux setitimer code is still available
via a compiler #define.
I have a much better understanding of how joysticks are handled under
the various operating systems now. Expect a working Linux joystick
implementation in the next day or two.
I finally found the AI stupidity in CivCTP, and the cause of the
save-game crashing bug. Hopefully I’ll zoom through the rest of the
CivCTP issues in the next couple of days.
Loren found that Anet doesn’t byteswap on Sparc. It was just in time,
too. 
Kudos to him!–
-Sam Lantinga, Lead Programmer, Loki Entertainment Software