Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Install Giver on Foresight 2.0.3



********Before you waste your time reading this and going through all this rigmarole to get Giver installed, you should know that somebody kindly commented to say that he has just packaged Giver for Foresight. So, it is now available in the testing repos. Install it by typing

sudo conary update giver=@fl:2-qa

I haven't tried this myself so don't yet know if it's better or worse than the procedure I used.
But, I'll try it tomorrow and maybe post on it tomorrow as well.**********

I'm so impressed with this Giver app that I tried today to install it on one of my favourite Linux OSes (Foresight 2.0.3) and it wasn't too difficult to get it working perfectly. Indeed, it works even better than it does in Ubuntu. This is principally because:
1. You can start it straight from Applications>>Internet>>Giver
2. There is no need to do any messing around with moving /usr/local/bin/giver to /usr/bin/giver and I didn't have to make any changes at all to /usr/local/bin/giver
3. I've never had to use the rescue line (export MONO_PATH=/usr/local/lib/mono/notify-sharp) as it's always worked perfectly from Applications>>Internet>>Giver

So all-in-all, Giver in Foresight looks very good. I've been able to send stuff to, and receive stuff from, Giver in both Ubuntu 8.04 and openSUSE 11.0 (gnome version only -- doesn't work so well in KDE4).

In addition I used a much less complicated install than I used in Ubuntu.
This is a step-by-step guide to what I did in Foresight:

sudo conary update mercurial
hg clone http://hg.circular-chaos.org/notify-sharp
cd notify-sharp/
sudo conary update notify-sharp=@fl:2-qa
autoscan
automake --add-missing
autoreconf

Here I get an error suggesting I use the "automake --add-missing" again. So, I type "automake --add-missing" followed by "autoreconf" and this time there's no error.
Now we continue, still in the ~/notify-sharp directory:
sudo conary update mono=@fl:2-qa
sudo conary update monodevelop=@fl:2-qa
./configure
make
sudo make install

Now we need to prepare for the installation of Giver-0.1.8.
So, first download it (465 KB) to your Desktop (~/Desktop) from here.
Then
sudo conary update avahi-sharp=@fl:2-qa

Now you need to install libglib2.0-dev which is not available in the Foresight repos. However, I could only find it available as a deb file so I downloaded the deb in Ubuntu (which I have in a separate partition) and converted it to a .tgz file using alien (sudo alien -t libglib2.0-dev-2.12.4_i386.deb)
Then I sent this .tgz file back to my Foresight partition using cl1p.net and copied this file to / using (from whatever directory I sent it to)
sudo cp libglib2.0-dev-2.12.4.tgz /
cd /
sudo tar -zxvf libglib2.0-dev-2.12.4.tgz


{If you can't get hold of alien, you can download it from here which should be available for a month or so}

Now go back to your Desktop directory
cd ~/Desktop

and do this
tar -zxvf giver-0.1.8.tar.gz
cd giver-0.1.8
./configure
make
sudo make install

and reboot.
Now you should have Giver in Applications>>Internet.
Click on it and a Giver icon should open in your Gnome panel as well as a Giver window showing whatever other computers are on the same network with Giver open.
So, go ahead and exchange some stuff with them.
Bear in mind that the guide above is what worked for me on both a Dell 4550 desktop and a MacBook (C2D). As I haven't done an exhaustive examination of how this is going to work on other computers, I really can't be sure it'll work as well for anybody else. However, I'll be surprised if there are any major problems.

1 comment:

  1. Glad to see you like Foresight, I have packaged giver and it is available in QA. It will make it to the main repo soon.

    sudo conary update giver=@fl:2-qa

    That will get it for now, thx for pointing me at giver, it is very cool!

    ReplyDelete