This is the second part in a series of posts for non-experts about setting up an Ioke development environment on Linux. Please see the previous post to start at the beginning:

• Part 1: Git

In this post we will install GNU Emacs from source and also get a basic configuration set up using the emacs-starter-kit.

If you already have Emacs installed and have an old configuration laying around you probably want to make a backup of this before following the below instructions. This post assumes that there is no Emacs installed and that the user doesn’t have any Emacs configuration in the home directory.

Installing Emacs

Git is an efficient Distributed Version Control System. Although the primary VCS for Emacs is still CVS – and it looks like they are moving towards Bazaar – we’ll get the Emacs sources from the Emacs Git mirror. We want to be cool, right?

~$ cd work
~/work$ git clone --depth 1 git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/melwin/work/emacs/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 46400, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (24410/24410), done.
remote: Total 46400 (delta 41204), reused 25501 (delta 21836)
Receiving objects: 100% (46400/46400), 74.38 MiB | 213 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (41204/41204), done.
Checking out files: 100% (2837/2837), done.

With the --depth 1 parameter we limit the history so that we only get the latest version of the files – in this case we’re not interested in the full history.

Note: As we’re getting the bleeding edge source code of Emacs, it could happen that the build is broken. I’ve never had this happen on me, but in case you get strange errors when building Emacs, this might be the reason. Usually such problems are fixed quickly, so try to do a git pull a bit later to update the downloaded source.

Previously, to get fun things like multi-tty support and smooth fonts, we had to get specific feature branches of Emacs. Nowadays, however, all the things we want are merged into the Emacs master branch. Before building, the only thing we need to do is to make sure the necessary development libraries are installed. In case you wonder how I came up with this list: the good ol’ method of trial and error. I simply ran the configure command and checked the error messages. This helped me identify the needed libraries. Now you can reap the benefits by just doing the following:

~/work$ sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev libxpm-dev libjpeg-dev libgif-dev libtiff-dev
...

… and then run the classical configure, make and make install:

~/work$ cd emacs
~/work/emacs$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/opt/emacs-23.0.60
...
~/work/emacs$ make
...
~/work/emacs$ make install
...

Phew. That burned som CPU cycles…! Once done – let’s add it to our bin directory, just as we did with Git.

~/work/emacs$ cd ~/bin
~/bin$ ln -s ../opt/emacs-23.0.60/bin/emacs
~/bin$ ln -s ../opt/emacs-23.0.60/bin/emacsclient
~/bin$ ls
emacs  emacsclient  git

Time to test. Just run emacs:

~/bin% emacs

This should show you an Emacs window with a pretty(?) GNU.

If you’re completely new to Emacs, this might be a good opportunity to run the Emacs tutorial. Emacs is a self-documenting editor, which means that most things that you might want to learn about Emacs can be found inside the editor itself – including information about internal functions and libraries.

To run the tutorial, just press Ctrl+h t (that is, control and h, release control, then press t), or, in Emacs lingo, C-h t (which is the convention I’ll use from now on).

Once you’ve learned enough (you did complete the whole thing, right?), just quit using C-x c.

Note: To update the source code and rebuild, do a git pull in the emacs directory, then make distclean (in case some build files changed) and then perform the compile and installation as per the above again.

Next up is emacs-starter-kit to get more functionality in Emacs and a decent default configuration to help us get going – stay tuned!

/M

Update: Part 3: emacs-starter-kit

In this series of posts I will guide you, the humble reader, through the install procedure to get a development environment for Ioke up and running. All the cool kids want to develop in Ioke nowadays, so let’s make you can as well!

The components we will be installing are:

• Git 1.6.1
• Emacs (latest snapshot) with emacs-starter-kit
• Java JDK 1.6
• Ioke (latest snapshot)

These instructions are written for a non-expert who might not have too much experience with compiling things, using Git or Emacs. If you’re an expert you will find nothing new or exciting here! The environment I use is a freshly installed Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex box, although most of it should be similar, if not identical, to other Ubuntu/Debian based distributions.

The components listed above will all be installed manually – not using the package system. This is to allow us to get the freshest versions of what we need without depending on the packages in the distribution to be updated (or hunted down in alternative repositories). The only thing we will install from the distribution are the compilers, tools and development libraries used to compile the software.

Why do we not use the package system? Well, that’s a valid question. Most of the above can be installed from packages in custom repositories. It’s simple and convenient. However here we will not use if for two reasons:

1. If packages are used we will depend on the repositories to be updated to use the latest version of some software, which can be annoying if we want to develop on the bleeding edge.
2. It’s good to know how to compile things yourself – so by not using prepared packages we might learn something!

To keep control over our custom built software we’ll install it in dedicated directories under $HOME/opt instead of in the normal locations like /usr/bin. This allows us to get everything installed without needing root access (except to install the compilers etc from the distribution).

First Step

Don’t Panic!

Always sound advice to start with – especially if you are hitchhiking. I’m going to try to cover each step in detail, but if you think something is unclear – just leave a comment and I’ll try to clarify. So – grab your towel and let’s get going!

Install Git

For Emacs, emacs-starter-kit and Ioke we will use Git to retrieve the sources. Therefore the first thing we need to install is Git.

In the command line instructions below, all lines prefixed by the prompt <dir>$ are commands to be typed in. The rest are output or my comments.

Open a terminal window and create a new work directory under your home using the following instructions. In this directory we will work with downloaded source files and build the software.

~$ mkdir ~/work
~/work$ cd ~/work
~/work$ wget -O - http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.1.tar.bz2 | tar xjv
... many lines...

The last command downloads the git source package and expands it in one go by piping it directly from wget to tar, which is told to expand it using bz2 with the j parameter. This is a convenient way to get packages off the net and unpacked, especially when there is no need to keep the package itself around.

The result is that we now have a git-1.6.1 directory in the work directory. Let’s see how we compile it:

~/work$ cd git-1.6.1/
~/work/git-1.6.1$ head INSTALL
 
                Git installation
 
Normally you can just do "make" followed by "make install", and that
will install the git programs in your own ~/bin/ directory.  If you want
to do a global install, you can do
 
        $ make prefix=/usr all doc info ;# as yourself
        # make prefix=/usr install install-doc install-html install-info ;# as root
 
~/work/git-1.6.1$

So – two commands. Simple enough! However, before we compile – we need to make sure all the relevant packages are installed:

~/work/git-1.6.1$ sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev zlib1g-dev libexpat-dev tk8.5 asciidoc docbook2x

Depending on your internet connection, this could take quite a while, as we need to download the texlive distribution, among other things, to build all of the Git documentation. This is not strictly necessary, but here we’ll just do it for completeness’ sake.

Let’s build git and make sure it’s installed under our $HOME/opt directory as we said in the beginning:

~/work/git-1.6.1$ make prefix=~/opt/git-1.6.1 all doc info
... lots of lines...

Compiling Git will take some time as well. Go get a coffee (or perhaps a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster – sweet like nectar).

Once the compile is done – install it. Note that we don’t need to do this as root as we’re installing under the user home directory:

~/work/git-1.6.1$ make prefix=~/opt/git-1.6.1 install install-doc install-html install-info

Let’s add it to the user’s path by linking it into the private bin directory. This depends on the standard Ubuntu bash shell profile script which adds ~/bin to the PATH variable. If a different shell is used you need to perform the appropriate steps yourself.

~/work/git-1.6.1$ mkdir ~/bin
~/work/git-1.6.1$ cd !$
~/bin$ ln -s ../opt/git-1.6.1/bin/git

Now close the shell/terminal, open a new one – and try the git command:

~$ git --version
git version 1.6.1

If you get the above output – great! You’re don! Sit back and relax for a bit before moving on to the next section.

However, if you don’t get the version output, but instead see the following message, review the previous instructions and make sure it works ok before continuing.

#INCORRECT OUTPUT - SOMETHING WAS MISSED!
#GO BACK AND REVIEW
~$ git                                                                                                                                                                                        
The program 'git' is currently not installed.  You can install it by typing:                                                                                                                  
sudo apt-get install git-core                                                                                                                                                                 
-bash: git: command not found

If you still can’t get it to work – drop me a comment!

Git in 30 Seconds

There are loads of good Git tutorials and information. You can find several on the official Git page and at GitHub (go sign up if you haven’t already, and fork me!).

Here is a quick run through of a few common Git commands you could try out with your freshly brewed cup of Git:

~$ cd
~$ mkdir gittest
~$ cd gittest/
~/gittest$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/melwin/gittest/.git/
~/gittest$ echo Test file! > test.txt
~/gittest$ git add test.txt
~/gittest$ git commit -m "Initial import."
[master (root-commit)]: created 79c091d: "Initial import."
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 test.txt
~/gittest$ echo Add line. >> test.txt
~/gittest$ git diff test.txt
diff --git a/test.txt b/test.txt
index 1cbaf90..3746f9e 100644
--- a/test.txt
+++ b/test.txt
@@ -1 +1,2 @@
 Test file!
+Add line.
~/gittest$ git commit -a -m "Add new line."
[master]: created b20f9a4: "Add new line."
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

If you can follow the above – great! First part finished. Next up is to install GNU Emacs from source and the emacs-starter-kit, which provides a decent default a set of configuration for Emacs.

Stay tuned!

/M

Update: Part 2: Emacs