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

From: Stuart Raeburn <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:37:32 -0400

Hello,

I'm making progress towards a LON-CAPA installation for Debian/Ubuntu.

Although I have yet to complete this for Debian 5 on i386, I expect  
you'll want to replace /home/httpd/lib/perl/tth.so after the install  
with tth.so.i386.fedora9 included in  
modules/TexConvert/tthperl/compiles, as that .so was built against  
perl 5.10 (which is the perl version on Debian lenny).

In the meantime changes are needed to loncom/build/distprobe and  
modules/TexConvert/tthperl/commands so that the install scripts can  
determine the current distro and architecture (when run on  
Debian/Ubuntu), needed if make build is to skip running make against  
the missing tthfunc.c and ttmfunc.c source files.

1. Replace loncom/build/distprobe with this one:

wget -O distprobe
http://source.loncapa.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/loncom/build/distprobe?content-type=text%2Fplain

2. For modules/TexConvert/tthperl/commands, insert the following lines  
between the current lines 2 and 3:

if [[ $arch == "unknown" ]];
then
     arch=`uname -m`
     if [[ $arch == i*86 ]];
     then
         arch="i386";
     fi
fi

3. For loncom/build/make build you'll need to have installed gcc,  
swig, bison and flex so the script can create a capa.so,

4. For loncom/build/make install (run as root) you'll need to have  
created a www user.

The preliminaries required on a RedHat/Fedora/Centos machine are  
handled by running an install.pl script (e.g., downloaded from:
http://install.loncapa.org/versions/redhat/5Server/rhel5_install.tar).

I am in the process of modifying this to also support Debian/Ubuntu.

Earlier (incomplete) work on installation on ubuntu 6.06 LTS  
(including a loncapa-prerequisites for LON-CAPA 2.5.X) can be found  
here:

http://install.loncapa.org/msu/testing/ubuntu/

I am in the process of building loncapa-prerequisites_1.12_i386.deb,  
which will install LON-CAPA's dependencies (predominantly perl modules  
provided as .deb packages), for ubuntu 6.06, ubuntu 8.04, and Debian  
5.0 (Lenny).

Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group

>     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 13:20:51 +0200

Stuart Raeburn wrote:

> modules/TexConvert/tthperl/compiles, as that .so was built against perl
> 5.10 (which is the perl version on Debian lenny).

   Hello,

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

> 4. For loncom/build/make install (run as root) you'll need to have

The user associated with www in Debian is www-data.
Can that user be used for Debian/Ubuntu, or is a separate www needed?

  Regards,
    Sietse