Setting Up A Development Environment
Contents
Introduction
I have seen a lot of questions on how to set up a development environment for LMCE. As a person with limited programming experience in c++, I can tell you that you don't have to be a master-level programmer to get your feet wet and examine the source code, and even make changes that add new features or fix existing bugs. It just takes a little patience, some help from experienced members, and a willingness to learn. There is a lot of information and help available in the forums, the wiki, and the linuxmce channel on IRC freenode servers.
That being said, dev work can also be risky business. You can seriously damage your installation compiling and testing changes, so USE THIS INFORMATION AT YOUR OWN RISK! If you really want to get started developing, the best advice I can give is to get a separate computer to set up as a development machine, so you don't damage your existing LinuxMCE installation accidentally! That way, if you make a change that LMCE really doesn't like, you won't trash your personally installation. (Too bad I don't follow my own advice, as I've done this before!)
The following tutorial represents my experiences only, and may not necessarily be the best or correct way to do things - though it has worked very well for me.
As I am a linux user, I am going to describe this process as I set up a development environment on my core from a computer running Ubuntu linux. Other linux variants will be very similar, if not the same. For Windows users, there is equivalent software that you can use, though I can't name any off of the top of my head - you will have to do your own research on that one.
Preface
The first thing I found surprising when I went to set up my first development environment is that it must be set up on your core. To my knowledge, you can't just make changes to the source on your desktop computer, compile them on your desktop computer, then upload them to the core. Everything must reside on the core, and you can have access to the source on your normal desktop over SSH (covered later). For those that aren't keen with working with a command line over ssh, this will take some getting used to (as was my case). But, once you get used to it, its not a bad development environment, and it even got me more familiar with the command line, and linux commands, which is something I've been meaning to do anyways. Lets get started...
Setting Up the Development Environment
Once you have a LinuxMCE Core up and running, the first thing we have to do is learn how to connect to it from our Desktop computer. On my Ubuntu desktop, I open a terminal via Applications->Accessories->Terminal. We will now use SSH to connect to out core - enter the following into the terminal:
ssh linuxmce@192.168.80.1
When prompted for a password, enter "linuxmce". (You may be prompted for a password several times during the setup of your development environment - this will always be "linuxmce")
Congratulations! You are now logged into the core over SSH from a remote computer! Now its time to install some packages needed for development. In the terminal, type:
sudo apt-get install subversion build-essential
This will install Subversion (SVN), which is needed to keep your local copy of the source code in sync with the latest changes, and well as some development libraries.
For my development environment, I decided to keep everything in my Home directory. The source can actually go many places, but I prefer using the Home directory. Lets go there now...
cd ~/
At this time, the source code is located at Charon Media (though it is supposed to be eventually hosted at svn.linuxmce.com). To download the most recent snapshot of the sourcecode that I know of, run the following:
wget http://www.charonmedia.org/lmce-1465.tbz
Once it downloads, test the checksum to make sure it didn't get corrupted during the download
md5sum lmce-1465.tbz
The checksum should be b3d4b3f6b33ff5e6c4641390f2314095
Now lets extract the source code:
tar xfj lmce-1465.tbz
And finally, lets download any changes that have been made since this snapshot was taken (this syncronizes your local copy of the source code with the most recent committed changes)
svn update
