Hey guys, I think after about a week of failed efforts I can now say I’ve hit one of the key issues with open source software, the sometimes lack of support. Ok, for work I’ve been asked to use an Internet Filter called Poesia. This filter was created on a European project to try and create a filter to help filter material like text, photos and video of an explicit nature. So naturally because in the project I am working on filtration of this sort of content is needed using this tool and integrating it with our prototype seemed like the most feasible idea, ofcourse until I attempt to install it somewhere.

Now to start with we have a dedicated server at work which annoyingly is not accessible physically by us and has ridiculous security restrictions placed on it (because they are trying make our lives easier aren’t they?). So anyhow I installed all the prerequisites for Poesia, but the Poesia ./configure couldn’t find the package netpbm.  So, anyhow like anyone would do they download the source and attempt to compile and install it. Though finding out that lots of the dev packages that really should have been installed with the OS are missing. I then trail to try and find compiled versions of these packages to save me time but some i have to compile and install separately. But just when you think you’ve had enough fun for one whole day you then find that netpbm itself does not make properly.

Anyhow I lose patience and decide to scrap the idea of the SUSE server at work and decide to try on my good friend, fedora at home. To do this on my fedora server (which this blog is hosted from) I setup a x86_64 VM using  kvm/qenu. Everything is working fine, I managed to install most packages needed for the installation using the my favourite package manager YUM. Everything installed, well I had to compile and install Boehm’s Garbage Collector as the one shipped with the distro didn’t allow for pthreads which apparently is needed. Anyhow the Poesia ./configure can’t find the garbage collector (don’t they come early in the morning?).

I question if they maybe caused by the fact that I was using a 64bit OS, and maybe this was causing the error with SUSE with libraries being in slightly different places e.g. lib64 instead of lib etc. So I create another VM, this time a 32bit one. This time everything installed ok, but Poesia ./configure completed ok, but now a error occurred.

Now I am at the point where I don’t know how to proceed, and hope I can find a source to help me through. Though on the plus side I’ve learnt a considerable amount on managing VMs in bash that I’m sure will come in handy another day.

until next time.