Help build an app from SourceForge

I would imagine you'd need to port the software to Unix. It uses Qt so that might not be impossible, but I suspect it'll be hard work, and quite possibly easier to write your own from scratch.

No, I'm wrong. It's apparently available for Linux already.

So what's the problem? What are you already doing, and where is it going wrong?

Yes, the developer actually states that his development platform is Linux.

The problem is that I have no idea what to do. I have done a little bit of programming in Windows, but with Linux, I am totally lost.

I have googled a bit, of course. The general tips I have found, state that there should be a "configure" and/or a "make" script. I can not find any of those in the files I have downloaded.

What I did was this:

On SF, I went to "Code":

clicked "Trunk" and then "f3fTime_v004", which I expec is the latest version.

Then, I clicked "Download snapshot". That gives me a ZIP file which contains a bunch of files. There is one file named "f3fTime.pro" which looks sort of interesting, but I have no idea what to do with it. It does not seem like an executable script.

The .pro and .qrc files seem to be used by qmake to build a Linux version. I have no experience with this, the qt4-qmake package in Debian might do what you want.

OK, here's the standard procedure for compiling an unknown program on Linux (or indeed Unix).

Read any files named in capitals; INSTALL often has installation instructions.

Is there a file called "configure"? If so, run it ("./configure"). Resolve any errors, usually by installing libraries, though working out which ones you need can be hard work.

Is there a file called "Makefile"? If so, run it ("make"). Resolve any errors.

You should now have a working program. "make install" (for which you'll want to be root) will put it where the software author thought it should be.

Roger Bell_West schrieb am 25.10.2015 um 00:51:

If you want to change the default location for the installation run it with

$ ./configure --prefix=/home/me/tmp

This will use /home/me/tmp as target directory when 'make install' is invoked.

Best, Marco.

Thank you very much, Mel. That helped a lot.

The qmake command produced a Makefile.

There were some complications with the serial port library qextserialport. I was able to download the files and install some developer packages, and after that, I could make the program.

The program now starts and seems to work perfectly, except it does not detect any serial ports. Could it be because the pi's serial port is named somewhat untraditionally?