[PilotMgr] How to get Pilot-Manager working on Red Hat 7

[hamkins@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

There isn't that much discussion of linux on this list, so I thought it
would be useful to pass along some tips I have on getting PilotManager
to work with Red Hat 7.  The web page at
http://www.moshpit.org/pilotmgr/binaries/ has a Red Hat Linux FAQ, but
only addresses an ancient problem with Red Hat 5.2.  

I finally got PilotManager working again, after almost a month of down
time.  I had it working under RH 5.x and 6.x, but it is getting harder
as time goes by.

Red Hat 7 comes standard with perl 5.6.0.  However, the PilotManager
website does not have Tk and small packages for perl 5.6.0, so we have
to build some stuff by hand.  Here is the basic outline:

1. Download and install the basic package.

   http://www.moshpit.org/pilotmgr/binaries/latest.dev.tar.gz
   tar tzvf latest.dev.tar.gz

2. Install the Tk perl module, if necessary.

   o Check if you have it with perl -e "use Tk" (no error message means
     you have it-- go to step 3)

   o Get the Tk module from the nearest CPAN site (If you don't know
     what this is, go to www.perl.com, and click on CPAN, then modules.)
     ftp://cpan.nas.nasa.gov/pub/perl/CPAN/authors/id/N/NI/NI-S/Tk800.022.tar.gz

   o For whatever reason, when I installed Tk as root, the "other"
     permissions were not set correctly.  I ended up having to change a
     lot of permissions (chmod o+rx) for directories in
     usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/i386-linux in order for PilotManager
     to see them properly when used by a regular user.

3. Install the PDA::Pilot module, if necessary.  This is the tricky
   step.

   You may have pilot-link 0.9.3 on your RH 7 box, but probably won't
   have the PDA::Pilot module installed, at least not for perl 5.6.0.
   So, you still have to grab the pilot-link source, because that's
   where the PDA::Pilot module is.  For consistency's sake, I decided to
   uninstall the RH 7 pilot-link

   rpm -e pilot-link

   and install pilot-link from the sources as well.  I got my sources at

   http://www.gnome.org:65348/gnome-pilot/download/pilot-link/pilot-link.0.9.3.tar.gz

   Then,

   ./configure
   make
   make install

   OK, we have pilot-link now, but still no PDA::Pilot.  The usual way
   to build the module is:

   cd Perl5
   perl Makefile.PL
   make

   At this point, if you're like me, you will get all kinds of compile
   errors such as 'na' undeclared, and so forth.  After a little (OK, a
   lot of) poking around, I noticed that the header file

   /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/i386-linux/CORE/embedvar.h

   (location may vary on your installation) uses a flag called
   PERL_POLLUTE to decide whether to define a dozen or so things, one of
   which is the 'na' that our compiler complained about being
   undeclared.  Set PERL_POLLUTE to 1 when you compile (or simply remove
   the #ifdef PERL_POLLUTE and #endif lines in embedvar.h) and try

   make

   again.  At this point, I got it to compile without complaining.
   Now you can

   make install

   Again, on my system, the permissions were all screwed up, and by hand
   I had to

   chmod o+rx /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/i386-linux/PDA
   chmod o+rx /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/i386-linux/auto/PDA
   chmod o+rx /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/i386-linux/auto/PDA/Pilot

   because otherwise a regular user running PilotManager would not be
   able to find the PDA module or the loadable objects.

After all that, PilotManager seems to work fine on my RH 7 box.  If
anyone finds this helpful, let me know.

     ----Jon
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