Sunday, March 9, 2008

Installing Dependencies for Portal Creation

This script uses PerlMagick and cURL to work its magic. Since Perl is included in most modern systems, there are only a few bits that you need to make sure are in place before beginning.

Windows
If you are on Windows, first make sure you have Perl installed (we suggest ActivePerl, which you can get from http://www.activestate.com). Next, grab PerlMagick, which is part of the ImageMagick package available under the Windows Binary Release section of the ImageMagick site (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php). Next, install cURL from http://curl.haxx.se/download.html and put the executable in your PATH. C:\Windows will work, but we suggest you add an entry to your PATH and put it there. If you choose the version of cURL with SSL support, you may need to install additional libraries. This script does not require SSL support.

Mac OS X
If you are on Mac OS X, you need to install ImageMagick. Download the source of ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/install-source.php). Extract the source, and then from the Terminal (which is located in /Applications/Utilities/), type the following commands:

cd ImageMagick-
./configure && make
sudo make install

Each line is a separate command. Enter the first command, then hit return and wait while a bunch of text flies by in the Terminal window. This will build ImageMagick from the source. If the string of text comes up with any errors at the end after the second command, then try running the command again with sudo at the beginning. After the third command, when sudo is invoked you will be asked for a password (and possibly a warning, if this is the first time you invoke sudo). Enter the Administrator password for your computer.

After ImageMagick successfully compiles, you may need to compile Perl-Magick, if it was not compiled automatically. Enter the following commands to build PerlMagick (the PerlMagick directory is a subdirectory of the ImageMagick- directory):

cd PerlMagick
perl Makefile.PL
sudo make install


Again, if there are any errors in step two, try invoking sudo at the beginning of the command.

Make sure you check the installation documentation that accompanies ImageMagick (in particular, the README and INSTALL files), since you may need some other programs that ImageMagick depends on. For example, on Mac OS X, we needed to install libjpeg (see http://www.ijg.org/) from the source tarball (jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz), using the following commands:

tar xvfz jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b/
./configure && make
sudo make install
sudo make install-lib
sudo ranlib /usr/local/lib/libjpeg.a


UNIX/Linux
Make sure that you have PerlMagick installed. This should be available in your Linux distributions package repository. If not, you can follow the Mac OS X instructions to compile it from source. You will also need cURL.

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