freeciv2.1 Build, Make, and Install

"Freeciv is a Free and Open Source empire-building strategy game inspired by the history of human civilization."  -taken from Freeciv

As a part of the "Teaching Open Source" book, there is an activity that helps you learn how to build, make, and install open source projects from source code. I went ahead and downloaded freeciv and extracted the files from the .tar.bz2 file. From here building was fairly simple. At first i ran into a problem with dependencies. Luckily the compilation script mentions which dependencies were left out. So i went in search for GTK packages in order to full fill the requirement. This proved to be very, very slow and agonizing. I finally came across a command that would find and download all missing dependencies for the freeciv projects.

sudo apt-get build-dep freeciv

This command worked great. next all i had to do was:

sudo make install

This installed to the default directory "usr/local/bin" and made the project. I got it to run nicely and all went well. This was a very simple exercise since i have commonly used these commands before in the previous course CSCI 360 "Software Engineering" Project.

Here's a screenshot of freeciv up and running:

Freeciv 2.1 Running

Getting, Building, & Running "OpenMRS"

My goal for this week was to checkout the latest version of OpenMRS and try to build and run it. Conveniently OpenMRS had a great guide for developers looking to build and run the source code here.  I found this guide to be very helpful. OpenMRS recommends that you use a couple of integrated pieces of software in eclipse such as m2eclipse and subclipse. subclipse and m2eclipse proved to be very helpful in the building process. Subclipse, which is a subversion client for eclipse, made it very easy to check out the Trunk for OpenMRS. All you have to do is type the repository's link and designate that it is indeed an SVN server. After checking out the code it was also very simple to build the code using m2eclipse, which is a client that maintains dependencies of a "mavenized" project. At first i encountered an issue with version conflicts but that was easily resolved. After resolving these issues i was able to succesfully build the project. Next my goal was to run the built code. This is the hardest part about the project since it has to be built as a web application instead of a piece of software that you use locally. OpenMRS suggests that you use TomCat to mount the OpenMRS web app. This is what i ran into trouble with. TomCat requires that you change permissions to the "users" file. I ran into trouble getting access to the .xml file. I am very close to getting OpenMRS to run and I am very excited to get it running.


I also got a response from one of the core developers and she suggested that we go ahead and resolve some of the ticket issues/bugs. As soon as i get OpenMRS built i will blog my experiences.

Subversion & Me...

For the last week or so I've been reading the Subversion Book that was given to us as a resource in our CSCI 462 class. The book was a great intro into Subversion and I learned a lot just skimming the readings. As a result of reading the Subversion Book i ran into some terminology i have heard before, but never really understood. I took it upon myself to do some research and actually learned quite a bit. A good example of an item i was not familiar with was the idea of an "apache" server. I took some time to look up what this was all about and educated myself on the Apache HTTP server open source project and what it was used for. I have a feeling ill be running into this open source project in the future.


Quickly after skimming through some of the important areas of the Subversion Book I decided to explore some of the commands and play around with Subversion on my machine. I chose not to install a subversion client and just run my subversion commands through the Ubuntu terminal. In my opinion this is much faster and much more clean than having to deal with a SVN Client that might have a GUI. Not to mention I'm starting to like familiarizing myself with terminal commands in Ubuntu. The "Cirdles Playground" provided to us proved to be very useful for this. I played around with some basic commands such as "update", "commit", and "checkout". All of these commands seemed to work without a hitch.


I feel like Subversion is a very efficient system for collaboration. I'm excited to get to work with and develop my skills with it. I think knowing how to use Subversion will be a very important skill to have in the future with a career in the computer science field. 


Heres a little screen shot of my work for all who are interested:

Subversion Work Screenshot

P.S. On our "Cirdles Playground" someone decided to upload some Chuck Norris Facts...I'll leave you with a running list of some Here.