What You Are Presumed to Know

If you are familiar with unpacking a tarball¹ and configuring and building the result, then you can skip this section.

This book will deal with source code distributions. Some distributions are made as pre-packaged binary (pre-compiled) distributions, ready for installation on your system. We will not be covering those, as your distribution is likely to describe the installation in careful detail. Since the following chapters presume you have the knowledge, we describe the methods and requirements here as an introductory section.

First, to unpack and build a tarball, you must have the following development tools installed on your system.

tar

This is an archiving and archive retrieval program. Basically, it stores a collection of file names, data and attributes in a single larger file. The data format is almost universally understood and comes as a standard utility on nearly all POSIX systems, Windows excepted.

cc

All of the packages we deal with in this book are either interpreted programs (i.e., not compiled), or they require a C compiler. If your system does not come with a C compiler, you will have to obtain a pre- built one, even if it is non-ANSI. Once you have at least a rickety compiler, you will be able to build GCC, Voir The GNU Compiler Collection. Most compiled packages require an ANSI compiler, though GCC carefully does not.

make

Most packages will build with a reasonably conventional MAKE program. If you do not have MAKE or if it is very old, you may have to download a pre-built binary for this program, too.

sh

You cannot do much of anything without a Bourne-compatible shell program. All of the packaging and building requires such a shell program to process various command line commands in an automated fashion. ZSH is pretty close and often can work, but CSH and TCSH are sufficiently peculiar that they are very tricky to get working correctly, so they are not used in the scripts. You need to have available a tried and true Bourne derived shell, viz., SH, KSH, or BASH.

All of these tools can be obtained by going to this web site:

     http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html#HowToGetSoftware
     

and following links to the source or binaries you need. However, if you have trouble obtaining or building these tools, there are several purveyors of GNU pre-built tools that will make your life much easier.

Once these tools are installed, then it becomes possible to build and install the various tools described in this book. Using the tools will also require PERL5, though, if you do not already have it. Since most programmers don't have strong need of Perl programming, it will not be covered in this book, but autoconf and automake require the Perl-5 interpreter for preparing your development project for building. Note: Perl is not required for actually building your product, unless you are using Perl sources yourself. Perl is only used to construct the make files.

Now, you have all your tools in place. Even Perl. To build and install any of the other tools described in this book, you need to perform the following steps:

• Acquire the mumble-1.2.3.tar.gz package for version 1.2.3 of the mumble tool and put it somewhere.
• Decide where you want to build and where to install the built product and do the following:
• cd /path/to/source
• gunzip -c /path/to/tarball/mumble-1.2.3.tar.gz | tar xvf -
  The tarball has now been unpacked into your source directory. You may build here if you wish, though it is often convenient to separate the source and build directories so that it is easy to distinguish between built files and source files.
• cd /path/to/build/dir
• prefix=/path/to/install/dir
• sh /path/to/source/mumble-1.2.3/configure --prefix=$prefix
  The product build instructions have now been customized for building on the current platform. (Many products can be cross built for alternate platforms. We won't be covering that here.)
• make
  If this step completes successfully, congratulations! You probably have a working product. "Probably" because there are so many platforms that it is possible yours was inadequately tested. This is actually highly unlikely for the widely used tools discussed in this book, but it is good practice to sanity check the product before installing it. Nearly all GNU-type products have a sanity check available:
• make check
  If this is successful, then we are now pretty sure it really does work the way it is supposed to.
• make install
  If you do not specify --prefix or specify a root-owned directory, you will likely need to perform this last step as the super user (root). Just make sure the $prefix/bin directory is in your PATH environment variable.

That's it. Now you can MUMBLE on your platform.