What is an alternative to OPENSUSE /etc/config.sys/ on LINUX MINT or UBUNTU?
Do you mean /etc/sysconfig? Because according to the documentation, /etc/sysconfig is sort of a catch-all system configuration location that's unique to SuSE. Kind of like how /etc/rc.conf is (sort of) unique to Arch. Ubuntu's system configuration is spread across many files and directories in /etc. Really though, if there is something that you want to tweak that you're unsure about, I guarantee you're not the first person to do it--community documentation is your friend.
Related
I originally installed boost per the instructions at http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/doc/html/bbv2/installation.html
I transferred most of my Windows user profile to a new computer, which contained a folder called CodeLibs. This folder is where I originally installed boost (in place of PREFIX in above documentation).
I compiled a project that uses the serialization library, and I didn't receive any errors.
My question is, is there any reason to go through the documented installation process again or is the above directory transfer sufficient?
Thanks in advance.
Copying should be fine, so long as the target architecture is the same.
Boost doesn't need to be "installed" in the typical way. There are no registry settigs to set, no COM servers to install, no daemons to set up. Nothing like that.
The install process you went through originally mostly consisted of compiling code. That code, once compiled, was then copied to some destination folder and some environment variables might have been updated.
None of this is truly necessary, but once you get the code on your target machine you might have to tweak a few paths etc so that the compiler can find the headers and libs (if any libs are needed), and executables can find the shared libraries.
Assuming you have a high level of proficiency with such things -- as is suggested by the fact that you were able to install it the first time at all -- I'm sure none of this will be a major challenge for you.
I'm trying to use the Quadprog++ library (http://quadprog.sourceforge.net/). I don't understand the instructions though.
To build the library simply go through the ./configure; make; make
install cycle.
In order to use it, you will be required to include in your code file
the "Array.hh" header, which contains a handy C++ implementation of
Vector and Matrices.
There are some "configure", and "MakeFile" files, but they have no extension and I have no idea what to do with them. There are also some ".am", ".in" and ".ac" extensions in the folder.
Does this look familiar to anyone? What do I do with this?
(Edit: On Windows.)
This package is built using the autotools. These files you talk to (*.am, *.in...) are because of the tools automake, and autoconf.
Autotools is a de-facto standard in the GNU/Linux world. Not everybody uses it, but if they do you ease the work of package and distribution managers. Actually they should be portable to any POSIX system.
That said, I'm guessing that you are using a non-unix machine, such as Windows, so the configure script is not directly runable in your system. If you insist in keep using Windows, wich you probably will, your options are:
Use MinGW and MSYS to get a minimal build enviroment compatible with autotools.
Use Cygwin and create a POSIX like environment in your Windows.
Create a VS project, add all the source of the library in there, compile and debug the errors they may arise, as if the code had been written by you.
Search for someone that already did the work and distributes a binary DLL, or similar.
(My favourite!) Get a Linux machine, install a cross-compiler environment to build Windows binaries, and do configure --host i686-mingw32 ; make.
This instruction say how can be build an program delivered like a tarball in Linux. To understand take a look on Why always ./configure; make; make install; as 3 separate steps?.
This can be confusing at first, but here you go. Type these in as shown below:
cd <the_directory_with_the_configure_file>
./configure
At this point, a bunch of stuff will roll past on the screen. This is Autoconf running (for more details, see http://www.edwardrosten.com/code/autoconf/index.html)
When it's done, type:
make
This initiates the build process. (To learn more about GNU make, check out Comprehensive gnu make / gcc tutorial). This will cause several build messages to be printed out.
When this is done, type:
sudo make install
You will be asked for the root password. If this is not your own machine (or you do not have superuser access), then contact the person who administers this computer.
If this is your computer, type in the root password and the library should install in /usr/local/lib/ or something similar (watch the screen closely to see where it puts the .so file).
The rest of it (include the .hh file) seems self-explanatory.
Hope that helps!
We are building a program under Linux which works within a specific Ubuntu version just fine. But we would like to have the same binary running on Ubuntu 10.04 and 11.10.
It would be completly ok to build the application on the 10.04 platform. But when I do this, I have dependencies to specific library versions (eg. libboost_thread.so.1.40.0) which are not aviable on 11.10 because it uses newer versions. The system is build using QMake.
I am looking for a tutorial or starting point how to solve these dependency conflicts for multiple Ubuntu platforms.
If nobody else feels like taking a swing at this I may as well inject something.
I am going to make a few assumptions.
You are distributing a binary/closed source application
You want to distribute it yourself
Thus ruling out the whole "just let the distro/users build it for their setup themselves".
Looking at how others have resolved similar issues I can see that it is common to include the shared libraries with your application and then use a loader/wrapper, what you want to call it, script that modifies the environment before launching the application. Specifically they modify the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include the /lib folder included with the application.
The script could be as simple as.
#!/bin/sh
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./lib ./myAppReal
That is how I solved distributing a Qt4 application to users having distributions not shipping newer than Qt-3.3.6 (in 2009... seriously). Edit: Might also say by users I mean the 5-ish people at the company paying for development, spec failure on our part not asking them to be more specific when they said cross-platform on modern operating systems.
Now someone will probably find about a dozen things wrong with this, but that's good, I can update and learn as we go.
EDIT: As JimR said this comes with security implications, if you leave your libs folder world writable someone may use it to inject malicious code into your application. Depending on how you plan on deploying it may or not be a real issue, but you should be aware of it.
I'm trying to design an SConstruct file for an embedded system project. The compiler on my machine is at "C:\Program Files\IAR Systems\Embedded Workbench 5.4\arm\bin" I would like the build system to try to locate the toolchain even if there is another verison of Embedded Workbench installed, or if the user has chosen to install it elsewhere.
I'd also be interested in strategies used in makefiles or ant files since they are probably useful here as well.
What are some strategies for doing this? Do I have options other than searching the Windows registry or looking for "C:\Program Files\IAR Systems\Embedded Workbench *\arm\bin"?
The simplest solution is to use an environment variable. You still have to set that up manually for each build host, but the build system need only refer to the environment variable, so can be common for all build hosts.
For example in your case you might have:
EWBARM_V0504="C:\Program Files\IAR Systems\Embedded Workbench 5.4\arm\bin"
And similar for other versions installed, and then in your build system you would use %EWBARM_V0504% in place of the path. The worse that will happen is if the variable does not exist the build will fail, which is preferable to using the wrong compiler, and easily fixed.
Since different versions of toolchains may have different bugs and/or features, silently falling back onto different sets of tools is probably a bad idea. When I've supported multiple tools versions on a single project, I usually have the version number assigned via a makefile or the environment. Then you can pass -D TOOLS_VERSION=$(TOOLS_VERSION) to your compiler and use that value to key bugfixes and workarounds you need for particular versions of the tools. This system makes it clear which tools you want to support, while still making it easy for other developers to switch tool versions by making a single edit.
The nice thing about SCons is you have all of python at your disposal. So you can use win32.winreg to look in the registry, or glob around in sets of paths, whatever works for you. And of course you can have a command-line option or an options file to override the autodetection. Then once you've found your tool of choice, you have basically two ways to make SCons use it: either prepend the tool's dir to env['ENV']['PATH'] (you can use env.PrependEnvPath for that), or just use the tool's full path as the value of your $CC (and set $LINK, $SHLINK etc. appropriately too).
I usually make a TOOL_MYCOMPILER function that takes an env and sets it all up for use with the compiler and its toolchain (cpp, linker, whatever). It keeps things cleaner in your SConstruct/SConscript.
The other day I set up an Ubuntu installation in a VM and went to gather the tools and libraries I figured I would need for programming mostly in C++.
I had a problem though, where to put things such as 3rd party source libraries, etc. From what I can gather, a lot of source distributions assume that a lot of their dependencies are already installed in a certain location and assume that a lot of tools are also installed in particular locations.
To give an example of what I currently do on Windows, is I have a directory where I keep all source code. C:\code. In this directory, I have a directory for all 3rd party libraries, c:\code\thirdparty\libs. This way I can easily set up relative paths for all of the dependencies of any projects I write or come across and wish to compile. The reason I am interested in setting up a linux programming environment is that it seems that both the tool and library dependency problems have been solved efficiently making it easy for example to build OpenSSH from source.
So what I was looking for was a decent convention I can use when I am trying to organize my projects and libraries on linux that is easy to maintain and easy to use.
Short answer: don't do a "heaps of code in local dir" thing.
Long answer: don't do a "heaps of code in local dir" thing, because it will be nightmare to keep up-to-date, and if you decide to distribute your code, it will be nightmare to package it for any decent distribution.
Whenever possible, stick to the libraries shipped in the distribution (ubuntu has 20000+ packets, it ought to have most of what you'll need prepackaged). When there is not package, you caninstall by hand to /usr/local (but see above about upgrades and DONT do that).
Better, use "stow" or "installwatch" (or both) to install to per-library dirs (/usr/local/stow/libA-ver123) and then symlink files from there to /usr/local or /usr/ (stow does the simlinking part). Or just package the lib for your distribution.
For libraries/includes...
/usr/local/lib
/usr/local/include
Where possible code against the system/distro provided libraries. This makes it easiest to ship a product on that distro.
However, if you are building a commercial application, because there are so many flavors of Linux distros that can mean you have to maintain a plethora of different application builds for each distro. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing as it means you can more cleanly integrate with the distro's package management system.
But in the case where you can't do that it should be fairly easy to download the source of each 3rd party dependency you have and integrate the building of that dependency into a static lib that is linked to your executable. That way you know exactly what you're linking against but has the downside of bloating out your executable size. This can also be required if you need a specific library (or version) not provided by the distro.
If you want your code to build on as broad a variety of different Unix systems then you're probably wise looking into GNU autoconf and automake. These help you construct a configure script and makefile for your project so that it will build on practically any Unix system.
Also look into pkg-config which is used quite a bit now on Linux distributions for helping you include and link to the right libraries (for libs that support pkg-config).
If you're using subversion to manage your source there is a "convention" that most subversion repositories use to manage their own code and "vendor" code.
Most svn repositories have a "vendor" tree (that goes along with the trunk, branches & tags trees). That is the top for all 3rd party vendor code. In that directory you have directories for each library you use. Eg:
branches/
tags/
trunk/
vendor/somelib
vendor/anotherlib
Beneath each of these libs is a directory for each library version and a "current" directory for the most up-to-date version in your repository.
vendor/somelib/1.0
vendor/somelib/1.1
vendor/somelib/current
Then your project's tree should be laid out something like this:
trunk/source # all your code in here
trunk/libs # all vendor code in here
The libs directory should be empty but it will have svn:externals meta data associated with it, via:
svn propedit svn:externals trunk/libs
The contents of this property would be something along the lines of (assumes subversion 1.5):
^/vendor/somelib/current somelib
^/vendor/anotherlib/1.0 anotherlib
This means that when you checkout your code subversion also checks out your vendor libraries into your trunk/libs directory. So that when checked out it looks like this:
trunk/source
trunk/libs/somelib
trunk/libs/anotherlib
This is described (probably a whole lot better) in the Subversion Book. Particularly the section on handling vendor branches and externals.
Ubuntu = Debian = apt-get goodness
Start with Linux Utilities:
%> sudo apt-get install util-linux