Building Linn OSS on Linux

[gwjsan]

Just in case anybody is going to try to build the Linn OSS - e.g. the current Auskerry release or Kinsky etc I thought I'd pass on a few things I've found whilst building the software on Linux.

1. Make sure you have an up to date distribution with the latest version of all the various items of software currently required for building. In my case I had to upgrade from ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 to ensure I could get all of the latest packages.

2. Ensure you copy the psd-to-png.py plugin from the source to the gimp plug-ins directory so that the calls to gimp to convert psd files to png will succeed.

3. If you are installing NSIS so that you can build installable packages you also need to get the NSIS Simple Firewall plugin (SimpleFC.dll) and install that in the NSIS Plugins directory.

4. If you are using the latest version of python (>2.5) then the file Core/Linn/CodeGen.py will error because it uses 'wU' for opening files - Universal mode seems to now only work with 'r'.

With the latest versions of all of the required software and 'wU' replaced with 'w' in CodeGen.py everything builds and runs successfully. In fact the build is very fast (apart from generating all of the png files for the first time).

So my linux development environment has:

ubuntu 8.04 (with the latest updated packages)
scons 0.97.0d20071203-1ubuntu1
mono-runtime 1.9.1+dfsg-1~bpo40+1
mono-gmcs 1.9.1+dfsg-1~bpo40+1
mono-2.0-devel 1.2.6+dfsg-6ubuntu3
gimp 2.4.5-1ubuntu2
nsis 2.28-1
NSIS_Simple_Firewall_Plugin_1.14
python2.5 2.5.2-2ubuntu4
python-lxml 1.3.6-1
python-4suite-xml 1.0~rc4cvs20061016-1

With this combination, and the change to CodeGen.py all versions I've tried (Auskerry, Bute and Kinsky) all build.