Support for Ubuntu 12.04

Perhaps one of the most frequently asked questions we get over on Launchpad Answers is “Does the Python client run on Ubuntu 12.04 yet”.

Until the release of 1.6.0-rc1, the answer has always been no. However thanks to the work of several contributors to the Berkelium project, Eng Chong Meng, and to Jianjian, we now have a version of the client that runs on Ubuntu 12.04 and hopefully has the pesky text rendering bugs from the 1.4 series client resolved.

If you have an Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit PC you’d like to install the client on, please see the getting started guide in the manual.

Since Ubuntu 10.04 is no longer officially supported by Canonical, we’ve dropped support for it from the Python client installer as of version 1.6.0-rc1. However, there’s no reason that if you’re otherwise happy with 1.4.2 on Ubuntu 10.04 that you can’t upgrade to 1.6.0 by the following method:

1. Open a terminal
2. cd /opt/xibo/pyclient
3. bzr pull lp:xibo/1.6

That will update your installed client to version 1.6.x (whatever the latest 1.6 release is at the point you run the command). It will replace your libbrowsernode.so file in the client directory with a version that’s not compatible with Ubuntu 10.04.

To resolve that, issue the following command in the terminal:

1. cd /opt/xibo/pyclient/client/python
2. cp /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/libavg/libbrowsernode.so.0.0.0 libbrowsernode.so

You should then be able to run the client as normal.

Going forward, the Berkelium project has now been abandoned in favour of Chromium Embedded Framework. If you have the skills to port libbrowsernode to use Chromium Embedded Framework instead of Berkelium then please get in touch as we feel that’s where this client’s future lies.