3 Building and installing ActBook

Acquire the source distribution

Currently, the only way to acquire the ActBook source distribution is by e-mail from SBND Technologies.

Acquire the Ximian Evolution source distribution

Currently, ActBook only builds using the sources of Evolution 1.0. You will need to obtain the Evolution sources from the Ximian web-site.

Unpack the Evolution source

The exact way in which this is done depends on the format of the Evolution source distribution that you have obtained.

• If you have obtained a tar/gzip archive of Evolution (evolution-1.0.tar.gz), unpack the Evolution source using the following command:

      % tar -zxf /path/to/evolution-1.0.tar.gz
  

• If you have obtained an SRPM (source RPM) package (e.g. evolution-1.0-1.srpm), unpack the Evolution source by installing the SRPM archive using the following command:

      # rpm -ivh /path/to/evolution-1.0-1.srpm
  

  Note: You may need to obtain root privileges to install an RPM package.

Configure the Evolution build settings

Many Unix applications need a configuration stage before their actual build. They need to be pointed at the location of various libraries, applications or system directories; they need to be configured to use one of several different types of interface for some system, library or application interfaces; they need to be customized to behave in one of several different ways towards the user.

Evolution uses a GNU configure framework. Before building the actual libraries and binaries, you need to change to the Evolution source directory (/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/evolution-1.0/ if you are using SRPM, or a subdirectory named evolution-1.0/ if you are using a tar/gzip archive) and invoke the configure script. It accepts various arguments; in the simplest case, you will only need to use the following command:

    % ./configure

If that should fail, you need to examine the output of the configure script and provide additional parameters. To obtain a list of the parameters that may be passed to the GNU configure script, use the following command:

    % ./configure --help

In particular, you may need to specify the path to the DB3 database that will be used for the Evolution build.

Build Evolution

Evolution is now ready to be built. Assuming that you have a GNU version of the make build utility, this is as easy as changing to the Evolution source directory (as in the configuration stage above) and typing:

    % make

Unpack the ActBook source

Now that you have successfully built Evolution, it is time to do something about ActBook :) Since the only way that the ActBook source is currently distributed is as a tar/gzip archive, you will need to unpack it using the command:

    % tar -zxf /path/to/actbook-1.0pre1.tar.gz

Configure the ActBook build settings

Just like Evolution, ActBook needs to be pointed at the locations of various GNOME components. Change to the ActBook source directory, named actbook-1.0pre1/, and issue the same command you used to configure Evolution, with one or two additional parameters: the paths to the Evolution source and build directories. Usually, the source and build directories are the same, but this is not necessarily so. In the simplest case, when the source and build directories are the same, you need to specify the --with-evolution=/path/to/evolution-1.0/ argument to the GNU configure script of ActBook. If the source and build directories are different, use the --with-evolution-src=/path/to/the/evolution/source/dir/ and --with-evolution-build=/path/to/the/evolution-build/dir/ parameters.

In the simplest case, all you need to do is issue the following command:

    % ./configure --with-evolution=/path/to/evolution-1.0/

Build ActBook

Once the configure script completes its examination of the system, it is time for the actual ActBook build. Just as with Evolution, you only need to issue a make (or gmake) command, and the ActBook build infrastructure will take care of the rest.

Install ActBook

We are almost there! :) ActBook has been successfully built, now all you need is to install it. Just like with many other programs, this is done with the following command (and again, you may need to substitute gmake for make:

    # make install