Subject: [LON-CAPA-dev] Re: Porting Lon-CAPA to current debian/ubuntu

From: Stuart Raeburn <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:52:03 -0400

Hello,

The TTH source files (tthfunc.c and ttmfunc.c) are unavailable from  
the web interface to the LON-CAPA CVS, as the license agreement for  
the use of TTH (see http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/tthfunc.html)  
does not allow distribution of the source code.

However, the license agreement permits distribution of compiled TTH  
code for use within LON-CAPA, so the approach taken has been to build  
tth.so files for supported distros/architectures and distribute them  
as part of the official LON-CAPA releases.

As you discovered from looking at the makefiles, support for building  
LON-CAPA for Debian was considered several years ago during the early  
stages of the project, but has not been part of the development effort  
in recent years.

It seems likely this will be revisited as there has been recent  
interest in running LON-CAPA on Debian and Ubuntu.  One possibility is  
for me to set up a Debian/lenny VM here and create the required tth.so  
you will need, and send it to you offlist. What architecture is this  
for?

Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group
(raeburn _at_ msu.edu)

>     Hello all,
>
> I'm new to lon-capa and this list and an trying to install lon-capa on our
> debian/lenny systems.
> From the the makefiles I infer that this hasn't been done for some time:(
>
> After some trivial changes I get stuck in modules/TexConvert/tthperl.
> There is no debian version, although with " ldd compiles/tth.so.i386"
> I get a normal output.
> But trying to augment the script to include debian will fail because
> of the absense of some files.
> The script "commands" cannot execute:
>   make -f Makefile clean
>   cp ../tthdynamic/tthfunc.c .
>   cp ../ttmdynamic/ttmfunc.c .
> The 3 mentioned files are not available.
> I also cannot find them in the CVS (webinterface).
>
> What am I doring wrong?
>
>  Regards,
>    Sietse Achterop
>    Computing Science departement
>    University of Groningen
>    The Netherlands

---

From: Sietse Achterop <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:09:18 +0200

Stuart Raeburn wrote:

> It seems likely this will be revisited as there has been recent interest
> in running LON-CAPA on Debian and Ubuntu.  One possibility is for me to
> set up a Debian/lenny VM here and create the required tth.so you will
> need, and send it to you offlist. What architecture is this for?

  Hello Stuart,

We use Debian/Lenny here at the CS department.
And Ubuntu is going to be used in the rest of our university in the near future.

  Thanks in advance,
    Sietse

---

From: Gerd Kortemeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:27:01 -0400

Hi,

On Jun 30, 2009, at 7:09 AM, Sietse Achterop wrote:

>> interest

You basically just need one dedicated server or one dedicated virtual  
machine. Is it possible to set up this one machine using CentOS, http://centos.org/? 
  We found CentOS to be an excellent alternative to the sometimes  
rather flaky desktop distributions of Linux. Other distributions that  
we support are Fedora, RedHat Enterprise, and SuSE (Enterprise).

In any case, do you run your servers on a 32-bit or 64-bit, Intel or  
PowerPC architecture?

> We are using Lenny, so does this mean that the exercise with the tth  
> source is
> not needed anymore?

I don't think tth is part of the Lenny distribution, and Debian is  
rather different from the other distributions, so I guess, yes.

>
>>
>> 4. For loncom/build/make install (run as root) you'll need to have
>> created a www user.
>
> The user associated with www in Debian is www-data.
> Can that user be used for Debian/Ubuntu, or is a separate www needed?

Yes, Apache needs to run as user "www"

- Gerd.

---

From: Sietse Achterop <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:01:48 +0200

Gerd Kortemeyer wrote:

> machine.
  Hi Gerd,

good point. I'll do that to get a working version to get started and play around with.
Getting the debian version now is a separate task that I still will pursue.
Thanks,
  Sietse