geolocalization & gtg, take 1

Came across the GTG project and was interested in possibly doing some development on it. The first major hurdle I encountered was getting a VM setup that worked with the right libraries. Since I was interested in working on the geolocalization features in GTG, I had to install the python modules for geoclue, clutter, and champlain. Turns out I was having a hard time getting python-clutter to install because it seemed that the apt sources were from an older version of Debian (squeeze) than what I was running (wheezy). Modifying the /etc/apt/sources.list, as suggested here, worked so that at least the module was found when I tried to sudo apt-get install it. But it turns out that it’s only compatible with python version < 2.7. And Debian 7 (wheezy) comes with python 2.7 installed by default. I tried downgrading python, but then that cascaded and a whole slew of other dependencies also needed to be downgraded. So I decided to start from scratch again and just use Debian 6 (squeeze), which comes with python v2.6.6 installed by default. From there, it was a breeze in getting things setup. Just a few administrative things to install up front:

1. Add myself to the sudo list. After running the following commands, I had to reboot the VM. It seems a simple logout/login didn’t work for me. After restarting, I was able to use the sudo

   su adduser myusername sudo

2. Add git and bzr so that I can checkin/checkout code. Xsel allows me to use a handy shortcut. Note that, if you’re using VMWare, you’ll still need to have VMWare Tools to be installed so that you can pass stuff between your VM and your host computer.

   sudo apt-get install git bzr xsel cd ~ nano .bashrc # inside .bashrc add this line: alias pbcopy='xsel --clipboard --input' # save the file and exit out source .bashrc

3. Created a sshkey for myself, pasted that into bzr, and then setup bzr.

   ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "email@address.com" ssh-add id_rsa.pub pbcopy " bzr launchpad-login

From here, I followed the setup guide here . Here’s how I solved (or tried to solve) the errors I encountered:

• After downloading the code from launchpad and then running ./gtg, I encountered this error message:

  E: Unable to locate package python2

  I did have python installed, but it was mapped to python, not python2. Solution:

  sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/python2

• Running ./gtg shows me this message:

  GTG can't find liblarch and liblarch_gtk

  The error messages provides a possible solution:

  To install missing libraries, run the following command in the current folder: git clone https://github.com/liblarch/liblarch ../liblarch

  I decided to use apt-get to install the missing libraries. But it turns out that liblarch (and liblarch-gtk) don’t have packages for squeeze, only for wheezy. So first I had to edit the sources.list file and then run apt-get:

  sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list # add this line to the file, feel free to change the url # to whichever/wherever is most appropriate for you deb http://carroll.aset.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/debian/ wheezy main # save file and exit # to ensure you get the new package list from the url you just added, run this: sudo apt-get update

  I tried to run sudo apt-get install python-liblarch python-liblarch-gtk, but I got a bunch of errors saying I had unmet dependencies, so I went with aptitude instead, searched for python-liblarch, and then went with its recommendation of how to resolve the dependencies. I repeated the same step with installing python-liblarch-gtk.

…And, what do you know – I hit another wall. I’m able to install liblarch and liblarch-gtk, but when I’m back at the prompt, I get greeted with this error message:

/usr/bin/sudo: No such file or directory

Looking at my PATH variable suggests that the right path is there (i.e., /usr/bin is included), but looking inside that directory, sudo isn’t listed. And which sudo return nothing. Looking online, suggests something reinstalling the OS and/or booting to a Live disc, mounting it and then copying the necessary files over. So, I’m back to square 1 and trying to figure out how to set everything up – this is frustrating!