Compiling and/or installing stick2xyz involves downloading the source or binaries, usually from SourceForge. Once that is done, you can optionally check the checksums of the package you downloaded. Then, you unpack the package using the tool appropriate for the package. RPMs are unpacked and installed automatically by the rpm tool; other binary packages typically have installers; and source tarballs are unpacked, compiled, and binaries and docs installed.

Stick2XYZ Installation Table of Contents

RPM Installation

RPM General Installation

The easiest way to install the RPMs is to download each RPM available from SourceForge, to an empty folder on the system you wish to install stick2xyz on. Once you have done that, it's easy to install all the RPMs with one simple command.

You can also install each package individually by replacing the asterdisk in the below command sample with a package filename.

Warning: Be certain that you are downloading the correct packages for your platform! If you use a 64-bit package on a 32-bit platform, for example, the program will not work.

[root@planetsaphire rpm]# rpm --install *

Once you have done that, you can check to see whether or not stick2xyz was installed by running pkg-config:

[kevin@planetsaphire rpm]$ pkg-config --modversion stick2xyz
1.0.3

RPM Testsuite

Warning: There is no testsuite available in the source yet, so this section currently doesn't apply to RPM installation.

I also distribute a specialized testsuite for RPMs on SourceForge, created from the testsuite found in the stick2xyz source tarball. It is useful for verifying that you have a good build of stick2xyz on your system. The testsuite will save the results to ‘testsuite.out’. It is appreciated that you send this file to stick2xyz-testsuites@lists.sourceforge.net with your operating system and computer processor information so that the developers can fine tune stick2xyz for portability. Anyway, when ready to run the testsuite, unpack the tarball to a directory, and type:

[kevin@planetsaphire rpm]$ ./stick2xyz-test

Sources Installation - General

General Configuration

To install from the sources, you may want to check that you have the most recent library versions of the features you wish to use. For example, the current version of libpng is 1.2.7.

Unpacking the Tarball

Once you have downloaded a tarball (we will assume the gzipped tarball in this example), you will need to unpack it:

[kevin@planetsaphire src]$ tar --gzip2 -xvf stick2xyz-1.0.3.tar.gz

After the unpacking, you will need to enter into the directory containing the sources:

[kevin@planetsaphire src]$ cd stick2xyz-1.0.3

Note: You may want to read the README and INSTALL files in case the instructions in them differ. This is especially true for tarballs that were not downloaded from SourceForge, because such tarballs are normally not official releases of the stick2xyz project on SourceForge.

Compiling the Source

First, you will need to run the 'configure' script, so that the source code will be fine tuned to your system. It is best that you run the command in a seperate objdir, because doing so keeps the object files away from the source files in case you have to file a bug report.

[kevin@planetsaphire stick2xyz-1.0.3]$ mkdir objdir; cd objdir; ../configure;

Note: You can use the –without-lang parameter to build only the english pack. This will cause the next process to skip all the human language packs except for the 'en' language packs.

Second, as the ending instructions tell you, go run 'make all'. It can take time to compile stick2xyz, depending on the options you gave to configure.

[kevin@planetsaphire stick2xyz-1.0.3]$ make all

The Testsuite in the Source

Note: There is no testsuite in stick2xyz yet.

Optionally, you can run the testsuite to verify that your installation works. To run the testsuite, run the following command.

[kevin@planetsaphire stick2xyz-1.0.3]$ make check

Note: The testsuite needs to be compiled before it can run, so please give the testsuite time to compile, depending on the options given to configure.; The testsuite will save the results to ‘testsuite.out’. It is appreciated that you send this file to stick2xyz-testsuites@lists.sourceforge.net with your operating system and computer processor information so that the developers can fine tune stick2xyz for portability. You do not need to subscribe to the list to post your results.

Installation after Compilation

After the sources are compiled to your satisfaction, you may issue the installation command, which usually requires you to become superuser to properly execute:

[kevin@planetsaphire stick2xyz-1.0.3]$ su --command="make install"

After that, you can run pkg-config to verify proper installation of stick2xyz:

[kevin@planetsaphire stick2xyz-1.0.3]$ pkg-config --modversion stick2xyz
1.0.3

Verifying the Checksums

It is very important that you verify the Checksums of the packages you receive. The actual checksums of each package and tarball we distribute will be uploaded as .sha256 files. You should check the sha256 checksum if all possible, because the md5 and sha1 algorithms have been found to be insecure these days. Here are a few commands you can use to verify the checksums:

[kevin@planetsaphire rpm]$ sha256sum stick2xyz-1.0.3.tar.gz

If the two lines of output from the above commands are equal, then the downloads you received should be untampered from the time the packages left my computer.

SVN Installation

If you wish to compile the bleeding edge version of stick2xyz, you can get it from the SVN HEAD via the following command:

[kevin@planetsaphire src]$ svn export https://svn.code.sf.net/p/stick2xyz/stick2xyz/trunk/stick2xyz stick2xyz

You will need to enter into the stick2xyz directory to run the config.svn script, which will update some M4 scripts and then run the autotools. You will need to install libltdl and libtool from your Linux distribution before running the config.svn script.

[kevin@planetsaphire src]$ cd stick2xyz/stick2xyz
[kevin@planetsaphire stick2xyz]$ ./config.svn

Once the script completes their job, you are ready to run configure, as if you unpacked the sources from a tarball. See the Compiling the Source section on what to do next.

Note: Official stick2xyz Developers must checkout the sources via svn+ssh; instructions will usually be e-mailed to such designated developers.