[Nel] Compiling the UDP benchmark on a Debian GNU/Linux box with Loic's packages installed

[Lars Weber]

Hi everyone!

With the help of ace (Vianney, if I recall correctly) on IRC yesterday I
managed to compile the UDP benchmark on a Debian GNU/Linux (unstable) box
with Loic's NeL packages installed.

Because I hit quite a few obstacles while doing it and I think that there
might be other people out there who want to give this a try, I figured I
would write a short summary of the steps that were needed (it's pretty
easy actually if you know what things to avoid).

Here it goes:

  1. Install the `libstlport4.5' package available in Debian (unstable at
     least) and also the `libnel0' and `libnel0-dev' packages from

       <http://people.debian.org/~loic/debian/>.

     (The packages were previously called `nel0' and `nel0-dev'; these
     should work too, I guess.)

  2. Get the NeL sources by following the 3 simple steps outlined at

       <http://www.nevrax.org/cvs/>.

     If you want to cut down on download time I think it should be enough
     to only checkout the code/nel/samples/udp subdirectory.  To do this
     replace the last step with something like `cvs checkout
     code/nel/samples/udp'.

  3. Change into the code/nel/samples/udp directory and use the editor of
     your choice to change the compiler/linker flags in `Makefile' to
     look similiar to this:

     ---8<---
     # The flags for the C++ compiler
     CXXFLAGS     = -g -pipe -D_REENTRANT -D_GNU_SOURCE \
                                     -I/usr/include/stlport \
                                     -I/usr/include/nel \
                                     -I/usr/include

     # The flags for the linker
     LDFLAGS      = -L/usr/lib \
                                     -lnelmisc \
                                     -lnelnet \
                                     -lstlport_gcc \
                                     -lpthread
     --->8---

     (If you change anything here note that it seems to be important to
     list the stlport include directory before the nel include directory!)

  4. Start you favourite editor again, only this time with `client.cpp' as
     the target.  In this file replace all occurrences of
     `InfoLog->displayRawNL' with `printf' and also (if you don't want to
     get output without any newlines) change all the string-parameters of
     the changed printf functions so that they have a newline (`\n') at
     the end.

     For example:

       InfoLog->displayRawNL ("%s", line.c_str());

     now becomes:

       printf ("%s\n", line.c_str());

     (Strictly speaking this whole step is optional.  If you don't care
     whether you get any output, you can safely skip it.)

  5. If you didn't forget anything (and neither did I :-) you should be
     able to run `make' now.

     If make worked correctly there should now appear two binary files in
     the current directory: `client' and `bench_service'.

  6. Ignore bench_service (it's only needed on the server end) and run the
     client program (i.e. `./client').  You will be prompted for a name
     for your connection and you can choose whatever funny name you can
     come up with.  (The program will create a client.cfg in the current
     directory; when you run the client from that same directory the next
     time you won't need to enter the name again.)

     (If you skipped step 4 you *won't* actually see a prompt but you can
     simply enter a name (funny, please remember!) blindly.  You can use
     up to 32 alphanumeric characters.)

  7. Hit <Enter> and enjoy! :)

Gruss,
Lars

P.S.: Corrections and additions welcome!

-- 
[ Lars Weber ]------< me @ lars.in-berlin.de >----[ GPG-ID: 1383B42E ]
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