Re: [sprog-users] Ubuntu 6.06 updates

[Grant M. <gr...@mc...>]

On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 00:05 -0400, Dick McCurdy wrote:
> I installed Ubuntu 6.06 and then downloaded all the tars to install
> Sprog-0.14. 

That would be 'the hard way' :-(

The Debian packages on the Sprog web site install cleanly on Ubuntu and
pull in the required dependencies automatically.

> I ran into one problem after another involving .t and .ko files with
> various messages that I can not reproduce, now. While I was struggling
> with the perl Makefile.PL and makes, I noticed the updates asked to be
> installed. After installing the current updates, Sprog installed with
> no problems. 

I'm glad you got there in the end.

In response to your message, I've updated the Ubuntu page on the Sprog
site to make it clear that the Debian packages do install on Ubuntu and
that the workaround for the broken canvas library only applied to the
previous Ubuntu release.

> The only thing I would wish for is a larger and useful library of
> gears.

Me too :-)  I've had virtually no time for working on Sprog and I'm not
sure that that's likely to change any time soon.

Here's one tip that you might find handy for expanding the gear library.
If you happen to know a shell command which does something you need then
you can wrap it up as a gear and add it to your palette very easily.

Let's say for example you wanted a gear to sort lines of text using the
'sort' command.

The first thing you need to do is tell Sprog where to store any gears
that you create yourself (you only need to do this once).  On the
'Tools' menu, select 'Preferences' then select a 'Personal gear folder'.
Using the browse button, you can select an existing folder or create a
new one. E.g.: /home/mike/sprog

Then you can drag a 'Run filter command' gear from the palette onto the
workspace.  Use the properties option on the right click menu to set the
command to 'sort'  (or 'sort -n' for numeric sort, etc) and then use the
rename option on the right click menu to rename the gear to 'Sort'.

Now you can add it to the palette for use in other machines by selecting
'Make command gear' from the right click menu.  You can put whatever you
like in the keywords field (which is used by the search function), the
default values in the other fields should be fine, so just press 'Save'
and the gear will appear in the palette.

If you want to try your hand at writing your own gears in Perl then the
help pages have a fair bit of information.

Regards
Grant