make install

I have linuxcnc running on debian wheezy. I wanted to make some changes to linuxcnc, so got the source via Git and recompiled, tested with the "run in place" script. Everything looks good, now I want to permanently install. I thought the command " make install-menus " would accomplish this, but it's the the case for me. Am I missing something?

PS - I recently converted our Shopbot Dekstop cnc machine over to linuxcnc control. I modified vfdb_vfd.c source code - adapted it to work with the Shopbot's Delta VFD-S spindle. That was a 3 week journey Hopefully I can get that code in the master branch some day

jut wrote: Everything looks good, now I want to permanently install. I thought the command " make install-menus " would accomplish this, but it's the the case for me. Am I missing something?

You do this with ./configure --prefix=/usr

The re-run make. I think you may also see to "sudo make install". The ./configure script output tells you what to do if you specify a --prefix.

Never "make install". There is no "make uninstall", because LinuxCNC is designed to either "run in place" or to be packaged by your distribution's packaging system, which can take care of uninstalling.

The consequence of running "make install" is that without 100% manual removal of all files installed that way, or a full OS reinstall, you can NEVER run a pre-packaged version again, because the two different methods (operating system package and "make install") don't cooperate.

Consequently, I strongly recommend against doing this.

Once you have the git source tree, you can build it into a debian package in the normal debian way, with dpkg-buildpackge or similar wrappers. This yields a .deb file which can be installed in the normal way in a debian system.

I was wondering why --prefix didn't seem to be documented anywhere.

As far as I can tell run-in-place systems are vaguely inconvenient, in that you have to open a terminal and type terminal commands to run LinuxCNC, so I can fully understand the desire to create an installed version.

I wonder if it would be a lot of work to add a --create-debs option?

We should document how to build packages, but running src/configure is *not* going to be the way. The last time I saw this documented was on the wiki, so it's been awhile. Meanwhile, getting clicky items for RIP buils is what "make install-menus" is for; the shortcut-creating feature of the config picker helps out here too.

It was reported in this thread that "make install-menus" didn't work. It works for me (debian jessie with xfce desktop environment), so we need more information to determine what is going on. Some DEs (one of the ones that John T tested that is in the Mint family) was simply broken for menus, so maybe there's a trick to it that we need to document.

andypugh wrote: As far as I can tell run-in-place systems are vaguely inconvenient, in that you have to open a terminal and type terminal commands to run LinuxCNC, so I can fully understand the desire to create an installed version.

Andy, yes, precisely. I have 2.6.12, but am making mods to 2.7.3 code. I don't wanna worry about which version of halrun/stepconf/etc from any given terminal.

Jepler, thanks for the tip on creating a deb package. I tried that with success. I got the source with "apt-get source linuxcnc". Then built a deb package with "debuild -b -uc -us". Modified the source code, then installed with "dpkg -i linuxcnc_2.7.3_i386.deb".

Unfortunately though, I previously ran "make install" on the source code from my git clone. Hopefully there's no issues.

Jut