Installation

Prerequisites

  • Python 2.1 or later.

  • LaTeX

    Required if you want to build the PDF or PostScript documentation.

  • latex2html

    Required if you want to build the HTML documentation.

  • Python 2.3 source

    Required if you want to build the documentation. The mkhowto program and LaTeX styles included in the distribution are used to build the documentation.

  • dia

    The diagrams in the documentation are edited and converted to EPS using dia version 0.88 (later versions do not render fonts correctly).

Installing

Unpack the package archive to extract the package source. This will create an albatross-1.36 subdirectory.

tar xzf albatross-1.36.tar.gz

Inside the albatross-1.36 directory are a number of directories.

albatross

Contains the Python code for the package.

doc

Contains the documentation source.

samples

Contains all of the sample programs discussed in this document.

session-server

Contains a simple session server which works with the Albatross server-side session mixin classes.

test

Contains the unit tests.

The Albatross package uses the distutils package so all you need to do is type the following command as root from the top level directory:

python setup.py install

If you have problems with this step, make sure that you contact the package author so that the installation process can be made more robust for other people.

If you already have a copy of Albatross installed and wish to test the new release before installing it globally then you can install an application private copy. If your application is installed in /path/to/proj then the following command will install a copy of Albatross that is only visible to that application:

python setup.py install --install-lib /path/to/proj --install-scripts /path/to/proj

If you wish to build the documentation you will almost certainly need to change first line of the Makefile in the documentation directory. This points to where you have unpacked the Python distribution so the Makefile can find the mkhowto program.

cd doc
make pdf
make html

Testing

There are a number of unit tests included in the distribution. These have been developed using the unittest package which is standard in Python 2.1 and later.

Run the following commands to perform the unit tests:

cd test
make

If you want to do more than run the unit tests, you can start to work your way through the samples which are presented in this document.

Table Of Contents

Previous topic

Introduction

Next topic

Templates User Guide

This Page