Easinstaller

Easinstaller is a little GUI tool for Unix beginners who need to compile a program/library from source, but don't know how. Easinstaller allows the user to open a source package, configure it appropriately, compile and install, all without the command line. It also keeps track of all packages that were opened, remembers their last configuration, and allows to load configuration of one package to another.

In other words, Easinstaller serves as a GUI substitution for the well-known ./configure && make && make install commands, allowing the user to set the needed configuration parameters from within the GUI.

Easinstaller is written using the Ruby programming language and the FoX windowing toolkit, via FoX binding for Ruby.

News

July 13, 2004 - Easinstaller 0.5 is released. This is mainly a release to fix some unpleasant bugs found in version 0.4. The only new feature is support for Russian CP-1251 fonts and corresponding resource files.

July 9, 2004 - Easinstaller 0.4 is released. Among other improvements are:
- Support for installing the package with the SUDO tool.
- You can stop a command now with the Stop button.
- Better buffering in the output window. Now you can see how the configure.sh scripts pauses at each line checking for something before printing its "Yes" or "No" resume.
- Experimental support for FoX 1.2.1 and FXRuby 1.2.0. Easinstaller versions 0.1-0.3 were developed with FoX 1.0.x and FXRuby 1.0.x. In version 0.4 support for FoX 1.2.1 and FXRuby 1.2.0 was added. Easinstaller must work with both sets of libraries, but because at the time of writing this FXRuby 1.2.0 is in its alpha version, this support is considered experimental.
- Easinstaller internals have been heavily refactored.
See the CHANGELOG for more details.

May 19, 2004 - Easinstaller 0.3 is released. Now you can load settings of a package you once configured to another package. See the CHANGELOG.

May 11, 2004 - Easinstaller 0.2 is released. Now you can change the language and font of Easinstaller. See the CHANGELOG.

April 12, 2004 - the first Easinstaller release.

Install

To run Easinstaller you need

The Ruby programming language. It is very possible that you find it in your distribution. Or you can get it from http://www.ruby-lang.org
FoX toolkit. Also present in many distributions. Its homepage is http://www.fox-toolkit.org
FXRuby - FoX bindings for Ruby - http://www.fxruby.org
The MAKE utility is present in all major distributions
EXPECT. Easinstaller works without it, but you cannot provide root password and install as root in this case.

Debian Testing (Sarge): On Debian Testing you can install all the needed packaged but for FXRuby with the following command:

apt-get install expect ruby libfox1.0

To compile FXRuby you will also have to install development packages for Ruby and FoX (which you can remove afterwards):

apt-get install libfox1.0-dev ruby1.8-dev

After you are through with this, unpack the Easinstaller archive, change directory to Easinstaller directory, and run the program:

tar xfvz easinstaller-0.1.tar.gz
cd easinstaller-0.1
./easinstaller

FoX/FXRuby Notes:

Easinstaller versions 0.1-0.3 were developed with FoX 1.0.x and FXRuby 1.0.x. In version 0.4 support for FoX 1.2.1 and FXRuby 1.2.0 was added. Easinstaller must work with both sets of libraries, but because at the time of writing this FXRuby 1.2.0 is in its alpha version, this support is considered experimental.

Note also that currently FXRuby 1.2.0 is distributed as a RubyGem package and you need RubyGems to install and use it. RubyGems is a wonderful package system combining features of apt-get and jar. Its homepage is http://rubygems.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl. Yet, currently you loose nothing sticking to 1.0.x versions of FoX and FXRuby ;-).

Yuri Leikind