Installing on a new platform

This page was written by Pluto and imported with their permission when LinuxMCE branched off in February, 2007. In general any information should apply to LinuxMCE. However, this page should be edited to reflect changes to LinuxMCE and remove old references to Pluto.

In addition to Pluto's own software, it uses lots of other software, like Xine, Asterisk, MythTV, etc. Each has its own set of requirements, like Apache, PHP, MySql. In the end, there are actually hundreds of packages or software programs Pluto needs to run. Because it would be too cumbersome to install all of them by hand, Pluto developed a database-driven, platform-independent installation system. The database back-end tracks all of the software and what other software it needs to work. For example, the database knows that if you want to run our Bluetooth Dongle on Linux, you need Bluez, which requires x and y, which requires z, etc., and on Windows it requires other libraries.

The

process is fully automated under Linux (Debian Sarge), which is Pluto's native environment. We will also have a fully automated version for Windows soon. If you want to add support for another platform, particularly another Linux distro, this should be a fairly eash task because 90% of the work is handled by the platform-independent back-end hosted on plutohome.com. In fact, the Debian-specific installation script is only about 100 lines in a bash file. If you know some scripting, it will probably be easier to write a new bash file for your

distro than to install all the packages by hand.

If you want to

write an installation script, an easy way to start is by checking out

the source code from our svn or cvs server. http://index.php?section=document&docID=101. Look in the directory ConfirmDependencies_Script. The Debian script is ConfirmDependencies_Debian.sh.

Then

there is the issue of the package names. Most distros use package names similar to Debian, but there are not always the same. You can look at this file: http://plutohome.com/download/stdpackages.txt to see all the

in a spreadsheet or editor. If you add a column next to the Debian name

someone here put those names in the database. If there are more

database accordingly. Once we upload it, then the installation script

for your distro will be available in the New Installation Wizard.

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see from our ConfirmDependencies_Script that the wrapper passes in the package name, the source, the repository name, the version, etc. It also passes in the type: get from package, download as a tar, get from

ConfirmDependencies_Debian.sh) will be specific to Debian. Other Linux distros should be able to use the same "get from tar", "get from svn", etc. scripts that we wrote for Debian. We provided separate scripts to download from http/ftp, etc. to make this easier. If you send us your revised package list, and a "get from package" version of your script, we will put on our site.</p>