Installing Straw on Red Hat 8/9

Posted by jodrell@spod.uk.net on 2003-08-01 00:00:00

Straw (http://www.nongnu.org/straw) is an excellent RSS aggregator for GNOME. RSS is a way of getting the headlines from news websites without having to open a browser and browsing to the site. Straw lets you subscribe to the news feed for a site, and then read the headlines straight from your desktop.

To get Straw working on Red Hat takes a bit of work. For a start, the Python and pygtk packages that ship with Red Hat don't have threading enabled. So first of all, we need to download the source packages, edit the .spec files, and recompile.

If you don't have a Red Hat source CD, you can download the source packages from http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/os/i386/SRPMS/

You need the python-2.2.2-26.src.rpm and pygtk2-1.99.14-4.src.rpm files. Install them with

    rpm -ivh python-2.2.2-26.src.rpm pygtk2-1.99.14-4.src.rpm

Now, change to the /usr/src/redhat/SPECS directory. There will be two .spec files, called python.spec and pygtk2.spec. First, open python.spec in a text editor and go to line 195, which is

    %configure --enable-ipv6 --enable-unicode=%{unicode}

and change it to

    %configure --with-threads --enable-ipv6 --enable-unicode=%{unicode}

Similarly, edit line 124 of pygtk2.spec to read

    %configure --enable-thread

Then compile the binary ?RPMs with

    rpmbuild -bb python.spec
    rpmbuild -bb pygtk2.spec

The binary ?RPMs created will be in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/{arch}, where {arch} is your processor type (probably i386). Install the new packages with

    rpm -Uvh --force python-2.2.2-26.i386.rpm \
    python-devel-2.2.2-26.i386.rpm \
    python-tools-2.2.2-26.i386.rpm \
    python-docs-2.2.2-26.i386.rpm \
    python-debuginfo-2.2.2-26.i386.rpm \
    pygtk2-1.99.14-4.i386.rpm \
    pygtk2-libglade-1.99.14-4.i386.rpm \
    pygtk2-devel-1.99.14-4.i386.rpm \
    pygtk2-debuginfo-1.99.14-4.i386.rpm

or if you're feeling dangerous:

    rpm -Uvh --force py*rpm

You now need to install the Berkeley ?DB3 libraries. I couldn't find ?RPMs for these so I just downloaded the db3 source and installed with

    cd /usr/src/db3-3.2.9/build_unix
    ../dist/configure --prefix=/opt/db3
    make
    make install

Now you need the Python bindings, from http://pybsddb.sourceforge.net/. To install these, download from SourceForge and run

    cd /usr/src/bsddb3-4.1.6
    python setup.py --berkeley-db=/opt/db3 build
    python setup.py install

Next, it's mxDateTime libraries. You can download binary ?RPMs from http://www.egenix.com/files/python/eGenix-mx-Extensions.html.

Finally, you need aDNS. Dag Wieers has very nicely packaged these, and you can get ?RPMs from http://dag.wieers.com/packages/adns/.

Now you are ready to install Straw. Just download the source tarball from Savannah, unpack, and run

    make
    make install

and hey presto!