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UPDATE to Release 0.3 of Packaging Kernel Utility

2012-04-13T23:30:00.003-07:00

Released my 0.3 on Thursday however there were some problems running the script that still had to be fixed after installing the rpm package. I've spent some time afterwards to try and fixed them after getting feedback from presenting my project on Thursday in my software build and release class. I needed to use the empty patch file I created to make modification to the original script and include it in my spec file.

Going back to the patch file I created a new patch that holds difference for the script. To create the patch file I needed to be in the directory
~/rpmbuild/BUILD

Once here I made a copy of the original source file
cp tools/imagetool-uncompressed.py tools/imagetool-uncompressed.py.orig

Then I went into the script and made changes to two lines
vi tools/imagetool-uncompressed.py

changed the lines:

load_to_mem("boot-uncompressed.txt", 0x00000000)
load_to_mem("args-uncompressed.txt", 0x00000100)

To:

load_to_mem("/usr/share/imagetool/boot-uncompressed.txt", 0x00000000)
load_to_mem("/usr/share/imagetool/args-uncompressed.txt", 0x00000100)

view the imagetool-uncompressed.py script is Here

Then I used the diff command to create the patch file by comparing the modified script with the original. Also this created the patch file within the directory ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES
diff -u tools/imagetool-uncompressed.py.orig tools/imagetool-uncompressed.py > ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/raspi-tools-0.2.imagetool.patch

Now that the patch was created, I updated the spec file with an entry to indicate the patch file and another entry to apply the patch.

after Source entry I indicated the patch

 Patch0:         raspi-tools-0.2.imagetool.patch

after %setup section I applied the patch

 %patch0 -p0

This is what my patch file looks like raspi-tools-0.2.imagetool.patch

Then I ran rpmbuild to test if that patch file worked and it was successful, below you can see when I ran rpmbuild that it asked what file to patch.

You can view my spec file Here

Once this was completed, I ssh into the Raspberry Pi, removed my old installed package and copied over and install the new package. I reinstalled
with rpm -Uvh raspi-tools-0.3-9.fc16.noarch.rpm

Then I tested running the script as the last time it was not able to find the two text files installed in /usr/share/imagetool. The screen below shows the whole process of installing and running the script.

After running the script it finally generated the files we wanted!!!.

The next point in this project if someone was to take over would be to work to merge "first32k.bin" with the kernel.img. Running the script produce the files we wanted however the script also produce this line
cat: ../linux/arch/arm/boot/Image: No such file or directory
I believe the work still needed to be done would require some editing of the python script so that It can read the files required that was not able to be cat.

I have included all versions of my package and script on my project wiki page witch is located here: http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Package_the_Raspberry_Pi_kernel_utility

Also you can download the updated 0.3 with working package as well as source rpm below

Downloads:
raspi-tools-0.3-9.fc16.noarch.rpm
raspi-tools-0.3-9.fc16.src.rpm
raspi-tools-0.2.imagetool.patch
View Spec file here raspi-tools.spec

Location of all my Releases and work: Project Folder

Release 0.3: Packaging Raspberry PI Kernel utility

2012-04-11T22:59:00.000-07:00

Working on testing my package these last few days and finally am releasing version 0.3 of the package. From the previous release there were errors I needed to fix and with this release have fixed most or if not all. I have tested the RPM and SRPM with rpmlint, also with mock and put it through koji. Finally moments ago have just tried installing the package on the Raspberry Pi through ssh.

Also I have added patches for each of the source files in the spec file. I am still trying to understand the need and use for this for the tool that i've packaged but have included them any ways. I did this by first by backing up the original file and then using the diff command.

diff -u tools/imagetool-uncompressed.py.orig > ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/raspi-tools-0.2.imagetool.patch

The following are the outputs of commands I ran to test my package:

rpmlint ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/raspi-tools-0.2-7.fc16.noarch.rpm

mock -r fedora-16-x86_64 ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/raspi-tools-0.2-7.fc16.src.rpm

koji build f17 --scratch ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/raspi-tools-0.2-7.fc16.src.rpm

After testing the package I ssh into a Raspberry Pi and secured copy over my package where I installed it with the command rpm -Uvh raspi-tools-0.2-7.fc16.noarch.rpm. This is a screen capture to show the install, the files installed and querying the rpm.

To download my package, source or spec file you can get them from these links below

Download RPM Package
Download Source RPM
View SPEC File

Release 0.2 : Packaging Raspberry PI Kernel utility

2012-04-09T20:48:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone, I've really been delaying work on this kernel utility package but hopefully in the next few days get everything working. I'm releasing a late 0.2 release with some changes to the package from 0.1 I released few weeks back. The changes I made were with the permissions of the file, location files are being installed to and the license. Also I fixed some errors with the RPM using rpmlint.

One of the things I did for this release was to check to see If I can actually install this package on my laptop running Fedora 16. The install worked and the files in the package are copied to the raspi-tools directory created in /usr/bin whereas my previous release installed to /usr/share.

Changed the %install section line

FROM-> mkdir -p %{buildroot}%{base_dir}/imagetool

TO->   mkdir -p -m 755 %{buildroot}%{_bindir}/raspi-tools

It was also mentioned to me from my previous release that the license section of my spec file had to be looked into regarding the author of the python script. With assistance to locate the information, I checked raspberry pi repository on github and found the person responsible for the tool after checking the commit message. I emailed the user and received confirmation to treat it as GPLv2.

I have tested the RPM with rpmlint and the SRPM's with Mock. There are some errors from the RPM that I am trying to fix for release 0.3 in the coming days.

Having installed the package on my Fedora 16, I attempted to run the script but received an error regarding the location the other file the python script needs to read from.

[namnguyen@timeline ~]$ /usr/bin/raspi-tools/imagetool-uncompressed.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/raspi-tools/imagetool-uncompressed.py", line 31, in <module>
load_to_mem("boot-uncompressed.txt", 0x00000000)
File "/usr/bin/raspi-tools/imagetool-uncompressed.py", line 17, in load_to_mem
f = open(name)
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'boot-uncompressed.txt'

Currently trying to get all of this fixed for my the next and final release. You can view my spec file, download my RPM and SRPM at the location below
View spec file Here
RPM Download
SRPM Download

Release 0.1: Raspberry Pi Kernel Utility

2012-03-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

Today I am going to be putting out the first release for a Raspberry Pi project that I have been working on and will continue to for the next little while. If you don't know what this is then have a look at raspberrypi.org. My goal is to release improved versions of the package in the weeks to come. The project is to take a tool that creates a header file which is then merged with the Raspberry Pi's kernel file so that it can be loaded into memory.

My project wiki page can be found Here.

The tool consist of an executable python script that requires two special files for kernel and bootloader. My task is to take these 3 files and create an executable RPM package which can be downloaded and installed. The script produces a file called "first32k.bin" which would be used and merged with "kernel.img". For this release the main focus was to have successfully build a RPM from this.

Using tools that I'd learned from my SBR600 class, I was able to create this RPM by creating a spec file for it and using rpmbuild. Having previously written a post on this blog on my experience and the steps to write one, helped me greatly to get this this done. One of the challenges was that this would be executable and needs to have certain files created in specific directories, include patches and have no build architectures.

This is the RPM Build Tree after rpmbuild completed

The link to release 0.1 RPM is : raspi-tools-0.1-1.fc16.noarch.rpm

Also, the spec file can be viewed here : raspi-tools.spec

The source zip file :
raspi-tools.tar.gz

The rpmbuild tool had successfully created a SRPM and RPM for me however I am sure there are many problems that I will have to iron out as by no means that the project is done. Some of the stuff that I want do for release 0.2 is:

test the rpm with rmplint for common errors, also with mock and koji
modify the package and spec file to follow Fedora Projects packaging guidelines Packaging:Guidelines - FedoraProject
connect with community to have package looked at and maybe even reviewed

Signing RPM package and Creating a Yum repository

2012-03-11T20:54:00.004-07:00

Signing RPM Package
I've learned that signing a RPM package is to create a digital signature for a package to show that you are the creator. It also ensures who has produced the package and to verify that it has not been altered by someone else. The tool that I used for signing is gpg which stands for GNU Privacy Guard, which creates digital signatures and much other things. I have packaged an RPM from earlier post that I will use to sign it.

First I created a GPG key with this command: gpg --gen-key

This was the output, I noticed that the tool asked for some user input when generating the key. Such as

the kind of key (chose RSA)
the keysize between 1024 and 4096 bits (chose 1024)
How long it is valid in days, weeks, months or years (chose 2m)
user identity including real name, email, and comment

It then generates the 1024bit key by taking numbers from the system. It asks that you perform some tasks on the computer to use some processing power which it takes numbers from. I used 1024bit so it took only opening a few browsers to meet the request.

Then I had to add my email address that I used when generating the key, to add in ~/.rpmmacros file.

The exact line I added was: %_gpg_name nhnguyen@learn.senecac.on.ca

Final thing I had to do was to install rpm signing package: yum install rpm-sign

Then we are ready to sign some packages, I tested this out by using rpm --addsign with my packaged rpm. Here is a screen capture of me going to my RPM directory and selecting the rpm to sign and then signing it. The process to take to setup signing package was not to complicated and may have taken me half hour.

Creating a Yum Repository
Before creating your own repository you will need a public server that you can used to host your files. For this step I used my user account with a public http folder hosted by my college.

After having this, I created a new directory called yumrepo where I copied over my new signed rpm package. To copy from my laptop to my schools server I had used SCP

Then I created a repository metadata for the directory where my rpm was located which creates a sub directory called repodata using this command:
createrepo ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/

This is the location of my repository: http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~nhnguyen3/yumrepo/

Testing

for testing I created a new repository file in /etc/yum.repos.d
Then I copied the file fedora.repo and called it test.repo
confirmed gpgcheck=1 and that gpgkey line was commented
Then switched to regular user and ran the command , with the output below
gpg --export --armor nhnguyen3@laern.senecac.on.ca

Now from this we can install using yum from this repository that was created

Creating a Repository-release RPM
I will post a RPM that contains my repo file and also the GPG key once I get it working. This should allow users to install and access my repository by just downloading this package.

The location of my repository: http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~nhnguyen3/yumrepo/

Testing Build using Koji

2012-02-11T20:55:00.000-08:00

If anyone has been following my posts so far I have created an RPM build that I am currently testing. For this post I am writing about "Koji" which is a client-server system that submits build job to koji's build hub. It is then retrieved by separate server system (builder) which tries to build it resulting in a success or fail!. I have used my gnuchess SRPM package that I have created from previous post for this test.

The first command I used below in bold instructs koji to build the package using the packages that are available in Fedora 17's distro. The "--scratch" option tells koji to build but do not tag it meaning it will not be included in Fedora.

koji build f17 --scratch ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/gnuchess6.0.1-1.fc16.src.rpm
Unable to log in, no authentication methods available

As you can see above, this was the message I got back from trying the koji command on my package. After some searching I found that the problem was that I did not have authentication and so I ran this command to obtain authentication.

fedora-packager-setup

Running this command generated a client certificate from the Fedora Account System (FAS). This was the whole output from running that command >>>>>>>>>>

This process required me to enter a FAS account which I had created already and also the password. The output also let me know that the Browser certificate was exported to ~/fedora-browser-cert.pl2

After this had completed, I re-ran the initial koji command that I first tried and this time it went through without any authentication message. The command again was
koji build f17 --scratch ~/rpmbuild/SRPM/gnuchess6.0.1-1.fc16.src.rpm

This is the screen shot of my terminal as the task was going on and the last line before it ended says that it completed successfully! Also from this we can see that a taskID of 3783537 was given to this task.

With this number we can check to see the status of a task:
koji watch-task taskID

Where taskID is the number given at the last line after the koji build command completed.

This was was the output from entering the koji watch command on my taskID

The whole process of using koji on my build was fairly straightforward with the exception of the authentication message that I received which required some searching. Overall the process I would say had taken 1hr and a half to get here.

Links
My SRPM of gnuchess
Create a Fedora FAS account

Testing BuildRequires with Mock

2012-02-06T20:57:00.000-08:00

Recently working with spec files I've learned BuildRequires are packages required to build the software. In this post I will give my experience using Mock which is used to test a packages BuildRequires. This will help us test that the BuildRequires are complete and accurate without anything missing.

To get started setting up Mock, I installed the mock package with this command:
yum install mock

Then I had to add my username to the mock group:
usermod -aG mock namnguyen

After adding my username to the mock group I ran mock as superuser and received this error message as I did not change to my regular account which I had just added to the mock group.

[root@timeline ~]# mock -r fedora-16-x86_64 ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/gnuchess-6.0.1-1.fc16.src.rpm
ERROR: mock will not run from the root account (needs an unprivileged uid so it can drop privs)

I then changed to the regular user account that I added to the mock group and was then able to run mock on my SRPM.

[namnguyen@timeline ~]$ mock -r fedora-16-x86_64 ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/gnuchess-6.0.1-1.fc16.src.rpm
INFO: mock.py version 1.1.19 starting...
State Changed: init plugins
INFO: selinux enabled
State Changed: start
INFO: Start(/home/namnguyen/rpmbuild/SRPMS/gnuchess-6.0.1-1.fc16.src.rpm) Config(fedora-16-x86_64)
State Changed: lock buildroot
State Changed: clean
INFO: chroot (/var/lib/mock/fedora-16-x86_64) unlocked and deleted
State Changed: unlock buildroot
State Changed: init
State Changed: lock buildroot
Mock Version: 1.1.19
INFO: Mock Version: 1.1.19
INFO: calling preinit hooks
INFO: enabled root cache
INFO: enabled yum cache
State Changed: cleaning yum metadata
INFO: enabled ccache
State Changed: running yum
State Changed: creating cache
State Changed: unlock buildroot
INFO: Installed packages:
State Changed: setup
State Changed: build
INFO: Done(/home/namnguyen/rpmbuild/SRPMS/gnuchess-6.0.1-1.fc16.src.rpm) Config(fedora-16-x86_64) 2 minutes 34 seconds
INFO: Results and/or logs in: /var/lib/mock/fedora-16-x86_64/result
State Changed: end

The first time I had ran this command it hung on "State Changed: running yum" for 10 minutes before I interrupt and exited. Not really sure why it hung there I checked /var/lib/mock/fedora-16-x86_64/result/build.log for any info and results. The only info within build.log was one line that showed Mock Version: 1.1.19. I gave mock another try and this time it continued on past "Stage Changed: running yum" and continued until it was done.

The second attempt had only taken 2 minutes 34 seconds and right now I'm not really sure why mock was not successful on the first attempt but was successful on the second attempt. My experience using mock in this process had taken an hour and a half of which a lot of time was spent on searching for the reason for my issue that I mentioned above.

RPM Writing continued

2012-02-05T23:39:00.000-08:00

Continuing on from my last post "RPM Writing", I will be be taking the RPM that was successfully built and testing it with rpmlint command. This command should check for common errors in the spec file,binary RPM and source RPM.

rpmlint on the spec file

[root@timeline ~]# rpmlint -i rpmbuild/SPECS/gnuchess.spec
0 packages and 1 specfiles checked; 0 errors, 0 warnings.

rpmlint on the binary RPM

[root@timeline ~]# rpmlint -i rpmbuild/SRPMS/gnuchess-6.0.1-1.fc16.src.rpm
1 packages and 0 specfiles checked; 0 errors, 0 warnings.

rpmlint on the source RPM

[root@timeline ~]# rpmlint rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/gnuchess-6.0.1-1.fc16.x86_64.rpm
gnuchess.x86_64: W: incoherent-version-in-changelog Nguyen ['6.0.1-1.fc16', '6.0.1-1']
gnuchess.x86_64: E: info-files-without-install-info-postin /usr/share/info/gnuchess.info.gz
gnuchess.x86_64: E: info-files-without-install-info-postun /usr/share/info/gnuchess.info.gz
gnuchess.x86_64: W: file-not-utf8 /usr/share/info/gnuchess.info.gz
gnuchess.x86_64: E: info-dir-file /usr/share/info/dir
gnuchess.x86_64: E: info-files-without-install-info-postin /usr/share/info/dir
gnuchess.x86_64: E: info-files-without-install-info-postun /usr/share/info/dir
gnuchess.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary gnuchessu
gnuchess.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary gnuchess
gnuchess.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary gnuchessx
1 packages and 0 specfiles checked; 5 errors, 5 warnings.

After running rpmlint to check for errors in the spec file, binary rpm and source rpm we are able to see what was checked, errors and warnings. There were no errors for gnuchess.spec and gnuchess-6.0.1-1.fc16.src.rpm but there were errors and warnings returned for gnuchess-6.0.1-1.fc16.src.rpm. Now that we know that which file has errors we will need to address them in order to have the rpm conform to rpm guidelines.

We can run the same rpmlint command with -i option to show informative message and additional explanations to the reported message

[root@timeline ~]# rpmlint -i rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/gnuchess-6.0.1-1.fc16.x86_64.rpm
gnuchess.x86_64: W: incoherent-version-in-changelog Nguyen ['6.0.1-1.fc16', '6.0.1-1']
The latest entry in %changelog contains a version identifier that is not
coherent with the epoch:version-release tuple of the package.

gnuchess.x86_64: E: info-files-without-install-info-postin /usr/share/info/gnuchess.info.gz
This package contains info files and provides no %post scriptlet containing a
call to install-info.

gnuchess.x86_64: E: info-files-without-install-info-postun /usr/share/info/gnuchess.info.gz
This package contains info files and provides no %postun scriptlet containing
a call to install-info.

gnuchess.x86_64: W: file-not-utf8 /usr/share/info/gnuchess.info.gz
The character encoding of this file is not UTF-8. Consider converting it in
the specfile's %prep section for example using iconv(1).

gnuchess.x86_64: E: info-dir-file /usr/share/info/dir
You have /usr/info/dir or /usr/share/info/dir in your package. It will cause
conflicts with other packages and thus is not allowed. Please remove it and
rebuild your package.

gnuchess.x86_64: E: info-files-without-install-info-postin /usr/share/info/dir
This package contains info files and provides no %post scriptlet containing a
call to install-info.

gnuchess.x86_64: E: info-files-without-install-info-postun /usr/share/info/dir
This package contains info files and provides no %postun scriptlet containing
a call to install-info.

gnuchess.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary gnuchessu
Each executable in standard binary directories should have a man page.

gnuchess.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary gnuchess
Each executable in standard binary directories should have a man page.

gnuchess.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary gnuchessx
Each executable in standard binary directories should have a man page.

1 packages and 0 specfiles checked; 5 errors, 5 warnings.
[root@timeline ~]#

I find that using the -i option with rpmlint is very helpful as it helps make the errors more human readable so that you can know where to look in order to fix the errors. I found that this site list most of the errors I have which are common so I am able to edit my spec file and make the changes.
common Rpmlint issues - Fedora Project

[root@timeline ~]# rpmlint rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/gnuchess-6.0.1-1.fc16.x86_64.rpm
gnuchess.x86_64: E: standard-dir-owned-by-package /usr/share/info
gnuchess.x86_64: W: file-not-utf8 /usr/share/info/gnuchess.info.gz
gnuchess.x86_64: E: info-dir-file /usr/share/info/dir
gnuchess.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary gnuchessu
gnuchess.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary gnuchess
gnuchess.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary gnuchessx
1 packages and 0 specfiles checked; 2 errors, 4 warnings.

Currently still working on trying to address the binary RPM errors as its stands at 2 errors and 4 warnings. Will update this post shortly once they are resolved.

My spec file, RPM and SRPM can be downloaded from these links I have posted.
gnuchess.spec
gnuchess-6.0.1-1.fc16.x86_64.rpm
gnuchess-6.0.1-1.fc16.src.rpm

RPM Writing

2012-02-05T20:57:00.000-08:00

Writing my first RPM was a rough and interesting process which required some effort put into build and testing. For this post I will explain the steps I took to write and build an rpm successfully. The RPM Package Manager (RPM) will contain a compiled version of software, which for me was the gnuchess software package.

There are some preparations we will have to do before we can start building RPM packages.

packages that we will require and need to install using yum command
yum groupinstall "Fedora Packager"
yum install rpmlint yum-utils

next we will create the ~/rpmbuild directory which also creates six subdirectories within

The command to create ~/rpmbuild will also create ~/.rpmmacros file alongside, entering the one single command will create all this
rpmdev-setuptree

note: To clean out dev directories, we can use command rpmdev-wipetree

Now that we have the required packages installed and directories created we can start building our RPM package!!!

First we will put the source code in the form of a tarball in ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES directory, my tarball was gnuchess-6.0.1.tar.gz

Once this is done, we will change directory to ~/rpmbuild/SPECS to create an empty skeleton spec file. The spec file is essentially important as it defines the RPM we are building by containing metadata and scripting necessary for the build. We will create the skeleton spec file with the command
rpmdev-newspec nameofPackage example of name is gnuchess.spec

We can attempt to build our package right now with the command
rpmbuild -ba gnuchess.spec where -ba is for build all. However it's certain to get several errors as there is nothing written in the spec files eight sections.

I found this part of writing rpm to be the most challenging as using the rpmbuild command countless times had produce errors seen below

error: Installed (but unpackaged) file(s) found:
   /usr/bin/gnuchess
   /usr/bin/gnuchessu
   /usr/bin/gnuchessx
   /usr/share/gnuchess/book.bin
   /usr/share/gnuchess/gnuchess.ini
   /usr/share/info/dir
   /usr/share/info/gnuchess.info.gz

RPM build errors:
    Installed (but unpackaged) file(s) found:
   /usr/bin/gnuchess
   /usr/bin/gnuchessu
   /usr/bin/gnuchessx
   /usr/share/gnuchess/book.bin
   /usr/share/gnuchess/gnuchess.ini
   /usr/share/info/dir
   /usr/share/info/gnuchess.info.gz

After a little bit of searching on the web I found the problem to be that I have not included these files in my spec file. The solution I found to this was to include n my %files section of my spec file which was empty

%defattr(-,root,root,-)
%{_bindir}/*
%{_infodir}/*
/usr/share/gnuchess

note: This line will differ depending on the package that you are trying to build

After including these lines I re-ran rpmbuild -ba gnuchess.spec and finally created my RPM successfully as the command did not produce any errors and last line returned an exit status 0. To confirm I checked the RPMS folder for the binary rpm and the SRPMS for the source RPM to confirm the builds success as shown from the print screen of my terminal above.

We have now got a RPM created and in my next post I will be testing it with rpmlint for errors and warnings. This process I would say took me a good couple of hours to get to this stage as it involved some reading on spec file and testing. I have included some links that I found helpful to understand rpm's and also spec files and their sections.

packaging software with RPM from ibm.com

how to create Spec file from fedoraproject.org

creating spec file from rpm.org

Build from Source Code

2012-01-25T21:09:00.000-08:00

I regularly install software by downloading a file and then running the installer, In this post I'll share my experience building two software packages to install on my Fedora system through the build process. When building packages, there are some that are easier and some harder packages to build as I found out.

First, I downloaded a group of development tools and development libraries using yum.
yum groupinstall "Development Tools" "Development Libraries"

From there I went to the GNU software collection where I selected many packages to try and build. Some packages were harder to build as I experienced when configuring the source code. The reason for this was that some of those packages required other packages which I did not have and so caused an error!. One of those errors when configuring was from not having "GTK+" which is the Gimp Tool Kit.

Two software packages that was fairly easy to build that I installed are:
barcode ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/barcode/barcode-0.98.tar.gz
gnuchess http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/chess/gnuchess-6.0.1.tar.gz

The command to download from command line using "wget"
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/barcode/barcode-0.98.tar.gz
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/chess/gnuchess-6.0.1.tar.gz

After downloading these two tarball files, I unzipped them using "tar" with the options "xvzf" for extract,verbose,gzip and file.
tar xvzf barcode-0.98.tar.gz
tar xvzf gnuchess-6.0.1.tar.gz

This is what the tarball files looks like in red and the blue folder is whats created after using tar.

Then change to the new directory with the cd command. Within the new directory there is a script called configure that will configure the build. I ran the script by entering ./configure

After the script ran with no errors I used the time command with the make script to build the software. The result of time make for both packages

barcode
real   0m2.316s
user   0m1.353s
sys   0m0.299s

gnuchess
real   0m2.806s
user   0m0.387s
sys   0m0.374s

After make ran successful, I entered make install to install the software. Finally to test that these builds are successful, I entered gnuchess and barcode from the command line to have these packages run.

My First Blog Post

2012-01-18T21:50:00.000-08:00

Hello I am a student studying in Seneca College's Computer Systems Technology program. The interest that I have in computers come from the fascination of the power it has to connect people together from everywhere in the world. The purpose for this blog is so that I can post topics regarding to Open Source material that I will be using and learning about.

One really interesting from few days ago was in my Software Build and Release class at school. It was a Raspberry Pi, a super small computer that will cost around $35 which also has the power to play HD videos and displays impressive graphics for its size.I think this is an awesome way to get younger people interested in computers.