Introduction

Aldrin being open-source, one doesn't need to wait for official releases before trying the latest bleeding-edge version.

However, it would be wise to check it out in a safe environment, without interfering with your stable installation.

Following the instructions below, you will end up with a separate installation of Aldrin, ready for testing and peeking around. These instructions should work for a bash shell environment on a recent GNU/Linux operating system.

Installing dependent packages

First, you need to install some development packages. The names may vary slightly from one distribution to another.

For Debian-based distributions, required packages are:

aptitude install \
 mercurial \
 g++ zlib1-dev libboost-graph-dev libsndfile-dev libsamplerate-dev fftw3-dev librsvg2-common \
 python python-ctypes python-gtk2

If you want audio support for ALSA or JACK, you also need at least one of these packages:

aptitude install libasound2-dev libjack-dev

Downloading the source code

First time

Create a directory where you want to download the source code of aldrin and armstrong.

We'll use ~/aldrin-test-src as an example, but you can choose another one.

mkdir ~/aldrin-test-src && \
cd ~/aldrin-test-src && \
hg clone http://hg.zeitherrschaft.org/armstrong && \
hg clone http://hg.zeitherrschaft.org/aldrin

Subsequent times

If you already have downloaded aldrin and armstrong source code in ~/aldrin-test-src, you can update to the latest version with:

cd ~/aldrin-test-src && \
(cd armstrong && hg pull && hg update) && \
(cd aldrin && hg pull && hg update)

Setting up environment variables

In order to build, install and run armstrong and aldrin where we want, we need to setup some environment variables so that the system is made aware of our installation location.

We'll use /tmp/aldrin-install, but you may choose any other installation location. On most systems, /tmp is going to be wiped when the machine reboots, so you might want to use a directory in your home folder instead for a persistent installation.

export CPATH=/tmp/aldrin-install/include
export LIBRARY_PATH=/tmp/aldrin-install/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/tmp/aldrin-install/lib
export PYTHONPATH=/tmp/aldrin-install/lib/python$(python -c 'import sys; print str(sys.version_info[0]) + "." + str(sys.version_info[1])')/site-packages
export ALDRIN_PATHCONFIG=/tmp/aldrin-install/etc/aldrin/path.cfg

Building and installing armstrong

Once you have set the environment variables as explained above, issue the following command to configure the build of armstrong:

cd ~/aldrin-test-src/armstrong
scons configure PREFIX=/tmp/aldrin-install

Check the configuration summary to see whether it has everything you want.

Then, issue the following command to build and install armstrong to our chosen /tmp/aldrin-install location (no need to be root):

cd ~/aldrin-test-src/armstrong
scons install

Installing aldrin

Once you have set the environment variables as explained above, issue the following command to install aldrin to our chosen /tmp/aldrin-install location (no need to be root):

cd ~/aldrin-test-src/aldrin
scons install PREFIX=/tmp/aldrin-install ETCDIR=/tmp/aldrin-install/etc

Running aldrin

Once you have set the environment variables as explained above, you can launch aldrin with:

/tmp/aldrin-install/bin/aldrin