Compiling Psi 0.11 in Ubuntu 6.10

December 29, 2006

The advantage to rolling your own Psi in the latest Ubuntu is that it’s been ported to Qt 4.2, which comes with the Cleanlooks theme so it blends in better with a GNOME desktop. Also, the new features in 0.11 (although it’s still in beta) definitely make the upgrade worth it. I’ve been using it in Windows XP for a few months now, but I’ve had big troubles finding a Ubuntu package that works. So… Let’s get compiling!

Prepare your build environment.

Ubuntu, by default, doesn’t ship with GCC/make/anything to compile software with. The first step is to install all that fun stuff.

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

Even if you’re using KDE already, the current KDE shipped with Ubuntu still doesn’t use Qt4. So, we need to get all of the Qt4 libraries and associated miscellanea.

$ sudo apt-get install libssl-dev libssl0.9.8 darcs libqt4-core libqt4-dev libqca1c2 qca-tls qca-dev

If you give a shit, that installs:

  • SSL headers
  • SSL binaries
  • DARCS: a source control system
  • libqt4-core: the actual Qt framework. Includes GUI elements, database systems, etc. Big package with lots of dependancies.
  • libqt4-dev: headers for QT development
  • qca: Qt cryptography libraries (headers and binaries)

Get the code!

Anyway, once all those packages install, you’re set to retrieve the Psi source code. This’ll pull the latest development snapshot from the DARCS tree, so things may break. If you’re so inclined, you can grab a beta source package that is known to have less bugs. The command to download the latest development snapshot to /tmp is:

$ cd /tmp
$ darcs get http://dev.psi-im.org/darcs/psi</pre>

Building Psi

Once that’s downloaded, let’s configure the makefile:

$ cd psi
$ chmod 755 configure
$ ./configure --qtdir=/usr/share/qt4 --prefix=/usr

The configuration should only take a few seconds, then you can build it:

$ make

On my system that took a good 20 minutes, but it all depends on what else you’re doing at the time. Once the build is finished (hopefully with no errors), you can install it:

$ sudo make install

A few seconds later that should be done. You can run your brand-spanking-new Psi by either psi, ./psi or /usr/bin/psi.