Can a man’s love for the command line blossom like a rose or age like good wine? I do believe the answer to my rhetorical question is a resounding YES! Recently I’ve found myself choosing gnome-terminal to execute things rather than clicking in a series of menus on my desktop. Don’t get me wrong; a GUI is nice thing to have, but the efficency of the CLI is unmatched. Through a series of unfortunate events I’ve setup my Linux environment for Android development (aka how trying to fix a bricked phone). I’m working with a fresh install from Fedora 16 Live. What that means is A LOT of packages/libraries are not installed. Just the bare minimum to get me going.

Here’s a general overview of the process I took:

1. Download and extracted the Android Software Development Kit.
2. Installed the Eclipse IDE (roughly 68 packages).
3. Installed ADT plugins for Eclipse.
4. Ran ./android command from SDK “tools” directory.
5. It started the “Android SDK Manager”. I then installed:
   1. Android SDK Platform-tools
   2. The covented “Android 4.0″ platform
   3. 3.2, 2.3.3, and 2.2 platforms (just to show that I can be verstile)

WGET the Android SDK

I’m really enjoy the simplicity of the WGET command. While viewing the SDK page in Firefox I simply copied the link for the SDK file and pasted it into the terminal:

$ wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r15-linux.tgz

Yummy, Eclipse

I then used YUM to grab the Eclipse IDE and all its relevant components. Again; since this OS installation was pretty light I ended up installing 68 packages, such as: Eclipse, Java, etc.

# yum install eclipse

Once that was done I then installed the ADT plugin.

1. I opened the Eclipse IDE.
2. Clicked on Help > Install Software.
3. Added the following repository: https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/
4. Clicked “Select All” and went to town! It was odd, but I noticed I had to try a couple times. It was claiming to have dependency issues. So; I started clicking one-by-one. Eventually I was able to get all 4 packages installed.

Running Android

This following set is unnecessary since you can access the Android SDK Manager from within Eclipse (thanks to the ADT plugin). Originally;  skipped the ADT plugin step.

Now that Java is installed I can run the “android” command. It’s located in the “tools” directory of your freshly extracted tarball file “android-sdk_r15-linux.tgz”.

$ ./android

SDK Managment

The Android SDK Manager popped up with some packages to install. I chose what I thought were appropriate and wrote this blog post while I waited for the files to be downloaded and installed.

So; that’s pretty much it. At this point you’re ready to jump into the wonderment, which is Android development. Enjoy!

References

1. http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/Howto:_Install_the_Android_SDK
2. http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html

About two plus weeks ago my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card died on me. It was a sad sad day in Fergyville. The mayor of town gave a heart-filled eulogy and instructed all residences to put their flags at half mast. I found a spare video card and saw it had a VGA port. So; I then ordered a DVI (f) to VGA (m) adapter from Cables for Less and waited another couple days for it to arrive. When it finally arrived, low and behold my spare video card was actually an AGP card and my motherboard only has PCI Express slots. I went spiraling down into a very deep depression (for about 2 minutes). I’ve been without my Linux partition for roughly two weeks and it was driving me insane.

When all hope was lost, I accidentally realized that my motherboard has an on-board video port. How could I have missed that!? I’ve disregarded on-board video for so long that I no longer see them when working on my computer. I was happy to see it, but when I loaded my Linux partition, I didn’t get nice, clear graphics. Instead I got fuzzy and impossible to work with X session.

It Works on… Windows!?

It’s kind of hard for me to admit this, but the on-board video DOES work in my Vista partition. I installed the drivers from the motherboard CD and to my surprise I was able to play Battlefield 2 (low specs though). How can this be… Windows should NEVER trump Linux… that’s just LAW!

Fedora 12, My Hero!

I spent the next couple of days on IRC and countless search results on how to fix this matter. Most of the responses were to try out Fedora 12 and see if it works then. I was very reluctant to do that. I finally got Fedora 11 all tweaked out the way I wanted and Linux distros really aren’t the best thing to do an upgrade on. It’s always best to do a clean install. I wasn’t ready to do that again. Someone suggested I at least try the Fedora 12 LiveCD. I thought, “yeah, that should be too difficult to do.”

I downloaded the 600+MB file within a matter of minutes and loaded it onto a USB drive. To my surprise, X worked. I immediately installed XChat and told my friends on #fedora-social. So; I then backed up my home directory and preceded to install a fresh copy of Fedora 12.

Always Learning

One of the greatest benefits to running Linux full-time is the learning aspect of it. I’m so used to doing a full DVD install of the distro that I take for granted what’s NOT installed if I was to scale back a bit. For example, I did a LiveCD install. It went fairly quick, but then I realized that some of the apps I’m used to having weren’t installed. No worries, just YUM the mess out of the terminal and I’m back in business. What I’ve learned this go around are the names of these vital GUI applications I’ve become dependent on. Damn I love Linux!

To my dismay, after installing Fedora 12, I soon realized that the famous “Docky” theme for Gnome-Do did not come stock. After some poking around their forums I saw that there was some legal issue between Gnome-Do and Apple. Blah blah blah, I have no time for Apple’s whining and pouting. They’re interfering with my FOSS-time. One person made it clear that even though this feature has been removed from the Fedora repos, you can always install Gnome-Do from source. Ha! What a noble idea, I thought to myself. I’ve gotten so used to repos and RPMs that I haven’t had to install anything from source in quite some time. Well- that alternative install method works and I jotted it down for ya’.

Where to Start

The first thing you should do is get your “development” environment ready to compile things from source. It’s pretty easy to do, just install some tools and libraries. In my case, I installed Fedora 12 from a LiveCD. That means it didn’t come with EVERYTHING pre-installed. No worries, just YUM-it-up!

The first thing I did was install a lot of tools and libraries via the “groupinstall” option:

# yum groupinstall "development tools" "development libraries"

That roughly installed about 149 packages. I then went to Gnome-Do’s web site and they suggested the following packages:

# yum install gtk2-devel gnome-sharp-devel gnome-desktop-sharp-devel gnome-keyring-sharp-devel mono-addins-devel ndesk-dbus-devel ndesk-dbus-glib-devel notify-sharp-devel GConf2-devel

This command yielded about 34 packages to be installed.

Up Next: Grab the Source File

Now go to Gnome-Do’s web site and try and find the source file! I say that jokingly, of course, they actually do a good job of pointing you to the right file. But for your convience, I have a direct link to gnome-do-0.8.2.tar.gz. Here’s the link to their launchpad site: https://edge.launchpad.net/do.

Last: Compilation

Once you’ve acquired the tarball- it’s time to unpackage the package and start the compilation process (sounds exciting, eh!?). Run these commands one at a time:

$ tar -xvzf gnome-do-0.8.2.tar.gz
$ cd gnome-do-0.8.2
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install

The first time I ran Gnome-Do and tried to go into the “Preferences” section, it crashed on me. Simply try again. Find the “Appearance” tab and choose “Docky”. Oh the joy of seeing it load. I could be incorrect, but if it doesn’t load, you’ll need to run Compiz first. God speed my fellow FOSSventurers. Let me know if you had a good experience with getting Docky to work.

I was trolling the Fedora forums when I saw a post by mariuszs on “Google Chrome in FC11“. A bit of excitement rushed through my body and I checked it out. Sure enough it lead me to the http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/ site and it left me very confused. I didn’t know what I was looking at.  Lucky for me it was explained in the thread how easy it was to add this test repository for me to eventually do a:

# yum install chromium

So; i’m reposting the instructions to give it more traction.

Add the Chromium Test Repository

I’ve been using RPMs to add repositories to my system. I didn’t know what actually went behind adding a repo.  It’s very easy: open a text editor, add in some code, save it and you’re finished.

gedit /etc/yum.repos.d/chromium.repo

Now add the following content:

[chromium]
name=Chromium Test Packages
baseurl=http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/F$releasever/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Save the file. It’ll create the “chromium.repo” in the “/etc/yum.repos.d” folder. Wow that was enlightening.

Install Chromium

Just run the yum install command and you’re good to go. The coolest part is, since it’s a repository, when the developer udpates it, you’ll get updated too.

# yum install chromium

Flash Support

mariuszs continues the thread by telling us about how to get Flash working in this version of Chromium on an x86_64 system. The guy’s a saint! There are three packages (flash-plugin, libcanberra-gtk2, and PackageKit-gtk), if you don’t already have them installed.

# yum install flash-plugin-10.0.22.87-release.i386
libcanberra-gtk2-0.12-1.fc11.i586
PackageKit-gtk-module-0.4.8-1.fc11.i586

Then link the “libflashplayer.so” file to the Chromium plugins folder, just like Firefox:

cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so

When you’re ready to finally jump right into Chromium, run this command: “chromium-browser”.  To enable Flash support append it with “–enable-plugins”. That option will activate Flash and cause other plugins (if you have any) to load with the browser. So; in the end, your final command will be

$ chromium-browser --enable-plugins

Thanks mariuszs for the detailed post and Tom “spot” Callaway for the repo and Chromium build. You guys are my heroium!

I am experiencing a deafening silience when it comes to the audio on my Fedora box.  As of this article being published I can not hear audio playing on my computer.  Such as:

• MP3s, Oggs
• YouTube, Hulu, and Flash-based player

Ironically when I do a “Soundcard Detection” it does find it, I hear the test audio.  I can even hear my recording that I just created in Audacity.  I am at a lotal lost.

Banshee 1.0

I think it started when I tried to install the lastest rave of audio players, Banshee 1.0.  I’m running Fedora 8, I’m a linux noob, so I checked my respositories and it had a version 0.13.  YUM search, YUM install all produced a non-1.0 version.  So; I downloaded the source file and tried to ./configure, make, make install.  Not to my surprise I had a dependency issue.  I did a search in my program manager and then google.com for any direction.  I’d find the library file and install THAT from source.  For the next hour or so it was rince and repeat.  Evey time I executed ./configure, I kept falling into a depenency issue.

For some of them I installed by source, but Fedora still didn’t recognize that it was installed.

Over the past couple of months – I’ve picked up that any library or program that comes stock with the distro you will find in /usr folder.  Anything you install afterwards should go into the /usr/local folder.  In there it has a “src”, “share”, and a “lib” folder.  So I could move my source files to /usr/local/src and compile them from there.  I would also install precomipled programs, such as Fire fox into the /usr/local/share/applications folder.

Well basically the system wouldn’t look into the /usr/local/lib folder to see that library I just install resides there.  I ended up on my LUG’s mailing list for some answers.  They pointed me into the right direction, but I STILL had other dependency issues.  It was not a pretty site.  Ironically; my older IBM Thinkpad R40 laptop is running Fedora 9 and I did “YUM install banshee” and it installed version 1.0 without any issues.  Hmmm, I might need to upgrade my desktop.

Overall; YUM seems to be a better route of installing programs, I just need to understand how to work it.  I still haven’t figured out the problem – I don’t know where to start.  This sucks!