Contents
Introduction
This page is outdated and has largely been replaced by a series of release-specific HowTo files. If you want a detailed step-by-step install process for a particular Ubuntu release, please go back to the Installation Notes and find the notes for your release. This page documents only general guidance.
Ubuntu is a great Linux distribution that has many things that I like and a few that I don't. One of the first things I noticed about Unbuntu was that it didn't come with a development environment in the default install. No problem, adding software is a simple task. Ubuntu is based on Debian and as such, depends on the Debian package manager and Ubuntu software repositories to install and and maintain the system.
The first question you need to ask yourself is whether you want to install XASTIR from source or as a binary (already built and ready to run). XASTIR is already available in binary form from the "universe" repository and should run "out of the box" for most users. Running XASTIR from a repository should almost always guarantee you with a working version of XASTIR at the latest stable release as a minimum. However, XASTIR is a moving target and is under heavy development and installing from source may provide you with important bug fixes and features not currently available from pre-built binaries from a repository.
This page gives general guidance for building on Debian-based systems. There are additional pages on the Installation Notes page that provide specific step-by-step instructions for building on particular variants of Ubuntu.
System Preparation
Whether you are installing the XASTIR binary or building it from source, you need to prepare your system by insuring certain repositories are available. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu for more information on Ubuntu repositories.
Preparing a Unbuntu system for software development requires the presence of a number of software packages. The most important of which is build-essential. To install this, use your favorite package manager that you read about above and install it:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
Hint: If you are installing many packages you can include them all on the same command line or
sudo bash
this will get you a bash shell with a root prompt. When your finished, type 'exit' or close the window. Don't know what sudo is? See Notes:Sudo.
The build-essential package is a meta-package that contains compilers and support applications needed to compile your own applications. You will still need to have a number of development packages available for other required libraries. Development packages generally have a '-dev' appended to the main package name but before the version information.
The following is a list of packages needed for building XASTIR with most features enabled:
build-essential
libmotif3
libmotif-dev
libax25
libax25-dev
graphicsmagick-libmagick-dev-compat
libexif-dev
libgraphics-magick-perl
libgraphicsmagick++1
libgraphicsmagick++1-dev
libgraphicsmagick1
libgraphicsmagick1-dev
libwmf-dev
x-dev
gpsmanshp
libshp-dev
libshp1
shapelib
tcl8.4
tcllib
libcfitsio-dev
libcfitsio2
libgeos2c2a
libhdf4g
libhdf4g-dev
libltdl3
libltdl3-dev
libnetcdf++3
libnetcdf3
libodbcinstq1c2
libpq-dev
libpq4
libsqlite0
libsqlite0-dev
libungif4-dev
libxerces27
libxerces27-dev
netcdfg-dev
odbcinst1debian1
unixodbc
unixodbc-dev
proj
libgsl0
libqgis0
qgis
curl
ibxp-dev
x11proto-print-dev
Many of these are not specifically needed to run XASTIR but are dependencies of installed packages.
Getting XASTIR binary
If you've followed the above recommendations for making Ubuntu repositories available, installing the XASTIR binary is as simple as:
sudo apt-get install xastir
This option also as the benefit of replacing installed binary code with new versions as they become available.
Getting XASTIR source code
After you have prepared your system to build source code, the next task is to get the source from the XASTIR site. There are two options available to you.
- The second is via CVS. I would only recommend this option to those who are familiar building software and comfortable with debugging compile issues. The developers make every effort to only submit changes to the CVS tree if the changes don't break anything else. However, this isn't always the case and at times it takes a bit of effort to get CVS code to compile.
Preparing the compile or what is './configure'
Now that you the tarball on your system lets get ready to compile it.
- Copy (or move) the tarball to a temporary location.
cp -p xastir-version.tar.gz ~/build
- The next step is to unpack the tarball
tar xvfz xastir-version.tar.gz
Now that you have a source tree you can build your source code as described in the Install Guide or XASTIR Manual. Pay careful attention to available command-line switches.
./configure --help
This will list configuration options available for compile.
Compiling the code
Once you've chosen configuration options and run "./configure" with those options, you can build the code.
make
If that completes with no errors, you are done.
Dealing with compile (or link) time errors
Hopefully, you should have a clean compile and the only thing left is to install. If, however, you receive errors or the compile fails, you need to do a little detective work to determine where the problem occurs. Errors are often caused by not having the development package available for a particular library or other generally easy to track down problems. Often you can cut and paste the error into Google to help provide leads on how to resolve the problem. If you are seriously stuck and have already made an effort to resolve the problem yourself you can post your question on the mailing list or web forum.
It's compiled, now what?
Now that you have compiled XASTIR your ready to install the application.
sudo make install
From a command-line you can run XASTIR by typing:
xastir&
If everything works okay, you can then create a desktop link or add a link to XASTIR from your system menus.