Getting Audela to Work (Not Yet)

If you're reading this, I assume it is because your an English speaker. If you're a French-speaker, you should look at the Audela pages where the real documentation is in French. I don't read (or speak) French, so I've had to do this by trial and error which is also the method that Google's translation service seems to use (ugh).

There is one report in the Audela website/testing results indicating that Audela does not with with Fedora Core 3, or seemingly with anything after RedHat 9. Maybe, I'm not that far yet. But the first problem I encountered was that Audela would not compile. There seem to be two things. First, there is a small error in a header file which the current g++ compiler will not let pass. Second, if you don't have any Finger Lakes Instruments equipment, you can safely delete two items from the configure script that prevent the build.

1. Edit the file src/audela/libaudela/src/cerror.h and remove the extra CError:: from the declaration of the message method on line 87.
2. Run the configure script as documented. After it completes, edit the file src/Makefile.defs and remove the reference to "fli" and "fingerlakes" in the two lists you will find there. Now you are ready to follow the remainder of the build instructions.
3. (1.4.0-beta1 only) Edit src/libcam/libethernaude/src/camera.c. There is a block of diagnostic code near the bottom which using sprintf and references cmdline, a variable which is defined in an #ifdef OS_WIN. Put the entire block inside an #ifdef OS_WIN. It will be obvious what I'm talking about once you look at the file.

Congratulations, you should now be able to build Audela using the instructions in the top-level readme.txt (which is also in French, but the instructions like "./configure" and "make external" don't need translation).

Unfortunately, at this point I'm stumped. The instructions don't tell you this, but all your code is now in the ./bin subdirectory and you can launche audela by changing to that directory and running ./audela. But neither the tutorial nor the test work for me, both want to connect to the audine camera (which I most definitely do not have) and the GUI is still in French (but I can kind of follow it).

Worse, it looks like audela wants to talk to all the cameras via a parallel port (except for webcams which use Video4Linux).

And lastly, while there is nominal support for digital cameras, Aud'ACE does not recognize any of my serial ports (I do have one native serial port which it should see when it launches), so I can't even set up a fake camera.

Other problems include:

• I can't get tkimg to compile on FC5.  The latest version is 1.3 and I'm getting an error while configure tries to evaluate part of it's script.  Oddly, the part it is choking on works fine when I manually type it into the shell, so I'm at a loss.  I've tried running autoreconf and autoconf and both complain about direct use of LIBOBJ instead of AC_LIBOBJ and refuse to reconfigure.  So I can't use the Img extension.