2 Installation

2.1 Obtaining the Software

The latest version of eCromedos can be obtained from the project's website at http:// www .ecromedos .net.

2.2 Installing Required External Software

In order for eCromedos to function properly, you first have to make sure that the following packages are installed on your system:

Package Description
python The python interpreter
libxml XML library of the GNOME project
libxml-python Python bindings for libxml
libxslt XSL library based on libxml
libxslt-python Python bindings for libxslt
imagemagick Library and tools for image manipulation
tetex Common TEX distribution for Linux

These packages are included in all modern Linux distributions and chances are, they are already installed on your system.

2.2.1 On an OpenSuSE Installation

On SuSE the names of the required packages correspond exactly to the ones given in the table above. In order to install them, start YaST and select the software management task.

2.2.2 On a Debian/GNU System

In order to install the neccessary packages on Debian, execute the following command as root:

$ apt-get install latex-ucs latex-ucs-contrib latex-ucs-dev \
    preview-latex-style python libxml2 python-libxml2 libxslt1.1 \
    python-libxslt1 imagemagick tetex-base tetex-bin tetex-extra

2.3 Installing eCromedos on Linux

eCromedos can be installed anywhere in the file system. It is recommended, however, that you place it in /opt. In order to do so, drop to a command line shell and become superuser root by typing

$ su -

Then change the working directory to /opt

$ cd /opt

and unpack the eCromedos tarball. The following example assumes that the package resides in the home directory of system user tobias:

$ tar -xvzf /home/tobias/ecromeds-x.y.z.tar.gz

Now change to /usr/local/bin and create a symbolic link to the main executable:

$ cd /usr/local/bin
$ ln -s /opt/ecromedos-x.y.z/bin/ecromedos

By placing this link in the system path, you will now be able to call the executable ecromedos directly without having to enter the canonical path.

2.4 Configuration

Having completed the installation procedure described in the previous section, you have to edit the configuration file ecmds.conf, which is located in the subdirectory etc below the installation folder.

If you installed eCromedos in /opt, you probably will not need to change anything. If you chose to install somewhere else, make sure the parameter base_dir contains the full path to the installation folder. In addition, check that each parameter ending in _bin contains the correct path to the corresponding program file.

Values of configuration parameters can be reused in arguments to other parameters by prepending a dollar sign to the name of the parameter to be referenced. For instance, if base_dir is set to /opt/ ecromedos-x.y.z/, then you can set lib_dir to /opt/ ecromedos-x.y.z/ lib by simply writing lib_dir = $base_dir/lib.