COMP8440: Lab2 - choice of 5

The aim of this lab is similar to the previous 'a2ps' lab, but you will have a choice of 5 projects to investigate. The idea is to expose you to a wider range of common FOSS project ideas. The 5 projects are: The level of difficulty in building these projects varies quite a lot. As a rough guide, the above list is approximately in order of difficulty, with FreeCIV being the easiest and OpenOffice.org the hardest. In order to maximize exposure of each students to as many projects as possible, when a student runs into difficulties we will often display their screen on the projector so we can discuss the problem as a class, and try to come to a solution together.

The level of difficulty is also heavily dependent on what method you use to fetch the source code. If you are very inexperienced with building FOSS packages, then the easiest approach will be to use the package manager to download the sources. If you are more experienced, then you should try to build the project using the latest development version (downloaded using a source code management system).

Helping other students

Cooperation between developers is one of the cornerstones of FOSS development. So please help out your fellow students if they are stuck and you know what the problem is. If you think the problem is of wider interest, then ask Bob or Andrew to display the students screen on the projector.

Faster download

Some of the above project are very large, and downloading the source code using a SCMS may take too long for this lab. For that reason we have put a snapshot of some of the project trees in /comp8440/sources. See the build tips page for more information.

Things to think about

Here are some things to work out about the project you are building