How-to 2009/04/02

My absolute favorite kind of how-to post involves me downloading, reading and running a shell script that automates an otherwise tedious and non-obvious process.  If it were straightforward, I wouldn’t be googling for it in the first place.  The Gist tool on GitHub is perfect for how-to scripts, so here we go.

So, since I’ve already chugged the promises of the Drizzle Kool-Aid, it is time I started using it in hopes I can soon contribute code myself.  Step one is getting the bugger to install.  Step two is writing a little program using the very Brian Aker-ified libdrizzle C library.  Today is a step one kind of day.

I’m on Ubuntu Intrepid myself but from the package lists, this looks like it'll work almost out-of-the-box for all Ubuntu flavors.  The hands-on part will be the Bazaar PPA but a visit to Launchpad will get you the right /etc/apt/sources.list lines and the appropriate key.

I started from a system that was already full of compilers and libraries so, for completeness, I’ve included a modification to the official Ubuntu dependency list.  The modifications get you newer Bazaar, newer libevent and what I believe to be a more generally build-ready environment.

This installs libprotobuf and libevent manually so make sure to comment those sections if you already have a version you like.