HOWTO Install from sources on a Debian system

From SystemImager

WARNING

This procedure is deprecated in version 3.9.2 and later: simply run `make deb` to build Debian packages (.deb) from source.

Debian

As far as the only Debian packages we can install with apt-get are the 3.6.3 version, please install the version you want from sources.

• Download the version you need from Sourceforge to a temporary directory
• Uncompress the downloaded file (using bzip2 and tar)
• Install the dependencies (these dependencies seem to be the same on stable and unstable) :

      # apt-get install cramfsprogs e2fslibs-dev  ncurses-dev libreadline5-dev rsync python-dev libtool \
        gettext zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libxml-simple-perl perl-tk uuid-dev flex bzip2 g++ libappconfig-perl \
        autoconf libdevmapper-dev docbook-utils docbook-to-man syslinux dpkg-dev debhelper libpopt-dev \
        texinfo tofrodos sysutils fakeroot

• Go into the directory obtained by uncompressing the file

      # cd /tmp/systemimager-3.7.6 

• Enter the following commands :

      # ./configure
      # make && make install_server_all (if you're on a server)
      # make && make install_client_all (if you're on a client)

• It will take time to compile, but after this step, the new version is installed :)

Special notes for Ubuntu users

• SystemImager assumes that /bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/bash. Ubuntu uses dash as the default shell (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh). In order to correctly compile SystemImager from source you need to change this configuration running the command:

 # dpkg-reconfigure dash

You can revert the default Ubuntu configuration by re-running the command above after the compile is done.

• Moreover Ubuntu does not provide some required headers in the standard paths and you need to manually create symlinks for them:

 # ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r`/include/linux/compiler.h /usr/include/linux/compiler.h
 # ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r`/include/asm/unaligned.h /usr/include/asm/unaligned.h

After these changes, you can successfully compile SystemImager from source following the same steps for Debian.