Preparing the Build Environment on Debian

About

This guide describes the procedure currently recommended for preparing a Debian (or most Debain-based) GNU/Linux system for building captdriver 0.1.x.

Setting up the Build Environment

As the superuser, install the important packages:

apt install build-essential automake libcups2-dev

Install Git if you are downloading Captdriver by cloning source trees:

apt install git

Once you have completed this stage, return to the unified guide, and pick the right Stage 2 guide to compile the driver.

Tested Systems

The above commands have been verified to work on Debian 10 "buster" (10.3, 10.6), Ubuntu 19.10, Xubuntu 18.04.1, and Zorin OS (Education Lite 15.3, Education 16.1).

It is expected to work on most other Debian or Ubuntu-based operating systems that base their packages on Debian's, use the same names, and the Advanced Package Tool (apt) to distribute and manage software packages.

Packages

The following packages or package groups make up the Debian Build environment:

• build-essential (package group)

• automake

• libcups2-dev

PROTIP: some of these packages be already installed out of the box on "Developer", "Education" or "Research"-focused OS distributions, such as Zorin OS Education.

Git is found in the git package, and is optional.

Troubleshooting

Missing packages and installation candidates

If you are not able to install any of the required packages above, and apt throws an error like the one below, important settings may be missing from the repository list, /etc/apt/sources.list:

E: unable to locate package build-essential
E: Package 'automake' has no installation candidate
...

Open /etc/apt/sources.list in an editor, and ensure lines like the following are present in the file exactly once, and not commented out with a leading hash sign #:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster main contrib
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian buster main contrib

PROTIP: The format is like

deb $MIRROR_URI $VERSION $AREAS
deb-src $MIRROR_URI $VERSION $AREAS

Where $MIRROR_URI is the URI referencing a mirror of a Debian repository, $VERSION is the release codename and $AREAS is one or more areas within the repository, separated by spaces.

After adding the repositories to the list, run apt update. After the repository data update, continue the installation process.

References

Advanced Package Tool. Debian Wiki. https://wiki.debian.org/Apt