Installation

Requirements

• Linux is the only tested OS
• GNOME 3 is the only tested DE
• Vala

Building from Source

The source code is hosted on GitHub.

Pre-installation Setup

Install Fedora 19 .. 23 dependencies

sudo dnf install -y automake autoconf libtool gnome-common intltool gcc vala
sudo dnf install -y glib2-devel gtk3-devel libxml2-devel libgee-devel \
 json-glib-devel clutter-devel clutter-gtk-devel gsl-devel gtksourceview3-devel \
 libmatheval-devel sqlite-devel gobject-introspection-devel gettext-devel \
 gettext-common-devel libmodbus-devel comedilib-devel librsvg2-devel \
 python3-devel pygobject3-devel

Install Ubuntu 14.04 dependencies

Notice: These commands have only been tested as part of a Travis-CI build.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vala-team/ppa -y
sudo apt-get update -qq
sudo apt-get install -qq gnome-common libglib2.0-dev libjson-glib-dev \
 libgee-0.8-dev libvala-0.22-dev libgsl0-dev libsqlite0-dev libxml2-dev \
 libmatheval-dev libmodbus-dev libcomedi-dev valac-0.22 librsvg2-dev \
 libgirepository1.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libclutter-1.0-dev libclutter-gtk-1.0-dev \
 python3-dev python-gobject-dev

Compiled Dependencies

Install Vala dependencies

git clone https://github.com/geoffjay/modbus-vapi.git
git clone https://github.com/geoffjay/comedi-vapi.git
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
sudo cp comedi-vapi/comedi.pc /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/
ver=`vala --version | sed -e 's/.*\([0-9]\.[0-9][0-9]\).*/\1/'`
sudo cp comedi-vapi/comedi.vapi /usr/share/vala-$ver/vapi/
sudo cp modbus-vapi/libmodbus.vapi /usr/share/vala-$ver/vapi/

Install libcld

git clone https://github.com/geoffjay/libcld.git
cd libcld
git checkout v0.3.1
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
./autogen.sh
make && sudo make install
cd ..
echo "/usr/local/lib" | sudo tee --append /etc/ld.so.conf
sudo ldconfig

Compile and Install dactl

Warning

Installation overwrites the configuration file at $(sysconfdir)/dactl/, if an alternate value wasn’t provided for –prefix than this is probably /usr/local/etc/dactl. It’s recommended that the existing configuration is copied over data/config/dactl.xml or backed up and dealt with separately.

git clone https://github.com/coanda/dactl.git
cd dactl
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
./autogen.sh
make && sudo make install

Post-installation Configuration

The make install command given previously will overwrite the site-wide configuration, to fix the ownership settings you may need to do something along the lines:

chown -R `whoami`.$(id -gn `whoami`) /usr/local/etc/dactl
chmod -R g+w /usr/local/etc/dactl
chmod +x /usr/local/share/applications/dactl.desktop

Optional but Useful

Currently the only drivers tested for data acquisition hardware are comedi. You might be able to do something in dactl without comedi, but probably not. Some distributions (Ubuntu?) have support for comedi built into the kernel provided, but not Fedora. The instructions that we use for compiling comedi using dkms are

su -
dnf install -y automake autoconf libtool git dkms kernel-devel kernel-headers
git clone git://comedi.org/git/comedi/comedi.git
cp -R comedi/ /usr/src/comedi-0.7.76+20120626git-1.nodist
cd /usr/src/
dkms add -m comedi -v 0.7.76+20120626git-1.nodist
cd comedi-0.7.76+20120626git-1.nodist && ./autogen.sh && cd ..
dkms build -m comedi -v 0.7.76+20120626git-1.nodist
dkms install -m comedi -v 0.7.76+20120626git-1.nodist
echo "KERNEL==\"comedi*\", MODE=\"0666\", GROUP=\"iocard\"" > /etc/udev/rules.d/95-comedi.rules

After these steps if you have a comedi compatible device you should be able to modprobe comedi as well as that for the device and it should show up in /dev. If not, a test device can be created by:

su -
dnf install -y comedilib comedilib-devel
modprobe comedi comedi_num_legacy_minors=4
modprobe comedi_test
comedi_config /dev/comedi0 comedi_test

However, test devices are of limited use, they allow for instructions only on with no support [1] for commands.

Footnotes

[1]	At least not that I’m aware of.