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Thread: Perl Programming

Author Image Gerry Patterson. The world's most humble blogger
Edited and endorsed by PGTS, Home of the world's most humble blogger

Installing PDK In Linux


Chronogical Blog Entries:



Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:33:18 +1000

In an earlier blog entry I described how disappointed I was to get advertising from my bank, which had been sent to my email address. Usually I tick the box that says do not send advertising (or untick the box that says send me advertising). However when I downloaded an evaluation copy of the Active Perl PDK, I did ask for information to be sent. And I was glad I did. They reminded me that if I purchased the Pro Pack I would get a license that would cover several platforms.

So I got the Pro Pack, because this would give me a PDK for Linux.

Installing the Active state PDK in Linux is fairly straight forward. However there were a few little speed humps along the way.

I decided to install the Activestate perl distribution in a separate folder and keep the standard perl distribution as is ... just in case it broke any packages.

Since I began using Ubuntu and Kubuntu distributions I have become an Ubuntu convert. No more dabbling into packages unless I really have to! Yes it is rather Windozy, but one does grow accustomed to these user friendly installs! The good thing about Linux (unlike Windows) is that I know that the source code is available. So I can look at it, if I have to. There won't be any hidden proprietary time bombs or just plain dumb programming, because all around the world there are thousands of eyes who have also seen the code.

So I didn't want install ActiveState perl and rename the existing perl libraries. On reflection, I realise that I probably should have done the same when I installed on the Mac. I suppose I can always go back to it and undo the install.

After installing Activestate perl (I chose the default location of /opt/ActivePerl-5.10), I downloaded the perl PDK and installed it in /opt/pdk.

One little gotcha is the Activestate license. I downloaded the license and ran it as root. However it seems that the license program has to be run by every user who is going to use the PDK. It only has to be run once. After it is run it writes the license information in the ~/.ActiveState folder.

Next I thought it might be wise to alter the path, so that if I was using perl I would get the Active State libraries. I simply modified my path as follows:

	export PATH=/opt/ActivePerl-5.10/bin:$PATH

I didn't modify my .profile, since I only want to do this when I am doing development work ... I will make a mental note to do it before using the PDK utilities. Actually it may not be necessary since the PDK install associates itself with a specific perl package during installation.

The other thing I noticed on Linux is that the Tk/Perl package does not work. It seems to be something to do with X. So rather than using Tk I decided to use Tkx (as with the Mac). It probably is possible to get Tk working on Linux. Well actually I know for certain it is, because I got it working in the standard perl distribution. However, I decided to take the course of least resistance with the Active State distribution. So far I have found Tkx quite ok. The only problem is composing an application that is portable across Mac, Linux and Windows.


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Copyright     2008, Gerry Patterson. All Rights Reserved.