Compiling Aegisub on Ubuntu 9.10

So thats a mess, ok. I found out that the stable versions require more modern FFMPEG as Ubuntu 9.10 provides. The solution is to use an older package then.

you need to download a version not younger than aegisub-2.1.6-dev-r2740.tar.gz (Revision 2740) from February 18th 2009 from
http://www.mahou.org/~verm/aegisub/archives/
and can confirm that this can include newest FFMPEG. For those who still dont know: There is no ffmpeg-dev, but you have to install different libraries -dev packages(most start with libav, I think essential should be: libavformat-dev and libavcode-dev) and also libhunspell-dev (HUNSPELL) for spell checking.

So my recommendation for Ubuntu to date is NOT to use the SVN version. I dont know why the require such new version of FFMPEG. It makes building unnecessary hard in my opinion.

I also installed these packages: ruby1.8-dev (otherwise you get “auto4_ruby.h:48:18: error: ruby.h: No such file or directory“), libperl-dev,…

Then you can enter directory and type

./configure
./make

And if that works ok:

sudo make install

That worked for me. If I missed soemthing ot you have questions pleas comment. And sorry I am not up to package building, yet. If a newer version works I will update this page, also.

Foresight Linux is dead?

The popularity of Foresight Linux has decreased in the last years, just as I had predicted. And the problems have not stopped. In October the next release was predicted by OgMaciel as being just around the corner. That would have been the end of October or start of November, but not January. The big problems had started when developers started not fixing current bugs of Foresight 1.x but instead focused on the new and great Foresight 2.x which was based on rPath 2.x. In fact it was a real mess. As I had tried it out, things were just worse than ever – and the reviews in the internet and user reaction also got worse. Instead of fixing the users problems one tried to fix this as a marketing problem. That dies not mean that those bunch of Foresight folks are not great people as humans or developers. But I dont look so much into what time they have spent and to how some things might be a cool solution – I just look at the state of Foresight – is it now more usable than some years before and did it gain more popularity. It didnt. Right now, this week it is on place 157 in DistroWatch or place 80 when you look at the last year. This had been very different. From my perspective a good distribution solves the users problem. This means things that dont work are fixed and sometimes new features are added. The goal has to be that users are satisfied and come back or continue using a distro. This is not always easy, but unfortunately many software projects take the route and try to make it all right and better. And the result is that the new status is not accomplished, timetables get delayed, users get more frustrated, people leave the distro, developers find new grounds, the support is shrinking and the software project or distro is dying. I fear Foresight will not continue to survive 2010. Not because the underlying technology is bad, but because a lot of bad decisions were made. I think this is sad, because I really liked it for a while. What would be needed is to reduce the overall work which needs to be done in order to be able to focus on the important things which are the users problems. Not even commenting on blocker issues isnt a good sign, really.