Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Building ElectricSheep on Fedora 16 (and enabling in KDE4)

UPDATE: Apparently these steps also work on Fedora 17. Moreover, if you use Gnome3, there are some additional instructions that can help you get ElectricSheep setup.
Quick link: Updated makeSheepFedora16.sh install script
A while back, I wrote a post summarizing how to get ElectricSheep running on Fedora 15 with KDE 4.6.5. Today, I "upgraded" to Fedora 16 and was surprised to find that library updates were incompatible with ElectricSheep. Symbol mismatches made it impossible to simply symlink old shared libraries to new shared libraries. Moreover, the version of electricsheep that built fine on Fedora 15 would not build on Fedora 16.

So I made some modifications to Tait Clarridge's script to fix the build. My hacks seem to work for me so far; hopefully they do not introduce regressions into the already old version of electricsheep.

So to get ElectricSheep running on your Fedora 16 system, try downloading and running my modified makeSheepFedora16.sh script. As a bonus, it (hopefully) will install ElectricSheep as a screensaver if you are running KDE. However, the same DPMS caveats about mplayer from old post still apply until Fedora updates their mplayer to a recent version (why does it take these people so long?).

6 comments:

salsaman said...

Thanks. I will add the kde desktop file to the sourcecode.

The latest version should build cleanly, but for fedora you will need to do:

ln -s /usr/lib[64]/libboost_thread-mt.so /usr/lib[64]/libboost-thread.so

before compiling.

There are currently some problems with wxWidgets in the code, hopefully this can be resolved soon.

- salsaman

hoboprimate said...

Thanks a lot for the script, works fine in Fedora 17.
If you use Gnome3, you'll need to install xscreensaver and add electricsheep to its list of screensavers. I found instructions to do so here, they work fine in Fedora: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/11/how-to-get-electric-sheep-to-work-with.html

Ted Pavlic said...

@hoboprimate -- Thanks for the update! :)

Anonymous said...

Worked great, thank you for the script! Not sure why I can't specify X11 or GL in the electricsheep-preferences video driver section, but if I leave it blank it works fine.

Shawn Q said...

Sorry that last anon comment was from me

Chris said...

I used your script to build the binary for ElectricSheep, but it was still missing something. I've detailed everything that was needed (including the use of your script) on my bog, which can be seen here -> http://xaerolimit.net/index.php/electricsheep/