It started when I had Debian 5.0 (lenny) installed on my machine. I tried to upgrade it to testing and unstable but things did not work out very smooth and for some reason I lost the complete graphical display. Then I went to #kde-edu on freenode and asked people for suggestions. Some people suggested me to install opensuse11.2, which I did.
For some reason I was badly missing synaptic package manager and breadth of packages that Debian provides. So finally I decided to use a distribution based on Debian. There seemed to be many options (http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros) but I choose ubuntu. Hence I downloaded ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) and installed it. But then while searching for a more "development friendly" ( not much concern for stability and so on) distribution I found that kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org/) would be a better distribution, probably because it had explicit focus on KDE.
If ubuntu is already loaded it is quite easy to move to kubuntu and edubuntu, install the kubuntu-desktop which is present in synaptic - essentially it will install many more kde packages. But the kde version with kubuntu 9.10 (karmic Kaola) is 4.2.3 however I needed the 4.4 libraries to build cantor on.
It is easy to upgrade KDE using ppa (personal package archives). Very clear instructions are given here (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Kubuntu). Once KDE has been upgraded follow exactly the instructions given here (http://edu.kde.org/cantor/obtain.php) to build cantor.
It is very likely that in the first attempt build errors will be encountered like ZLIB (missing: LIBRARY HEADER) and so on. I went through the error messages carefully and and searched the corresponding packages in synaptic. All of the essential packages were available. After installing all the packages I could build and install cantor ( a mathematical frontend for sage, maxima, R and so on).
However in all these process following things must be noted
For some reason I was badly missing synaptic package manager and breadth of packages that Debian provides. So finally I decided to use a distribution based on Debian. There seemed to be many options (http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros) but I choose ubuntu. Hence I downloaded ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) and installed it. But then while searching for a more "development friendly" ( not much concern for stability and so on) distribution I found that kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org/) would be a better distribution, probably because it had explicit focus on KDE.
If ubuntu is already loaded it is quite easy to move to kubuntu and edubuntu, install the kubuntu-desktop which is present in synaptic - essentially it will install many more kde packages. But the kde version with kubuntu 9.10 (karmic Kaola) is 4.2.3 however I needed the 4.4 libraries to build cantor on.
It is easy to upgrade KDE using ppa (personal package archives). Very clear instructions are given here (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Kubuntu). Once KDE has been upgraded follow exactly the instructions given here (http://edu.kde.org/cantor/obtain.php) to build cantor.
It is very likely that in the first attempt build errors will be encountered like ZLIB (missing: LIBRARY HEADER) and so on. I went through the error messages carefully and and searched the corresponding packages in synaptic. All of the essential packages were available. After installing all the packages I could build and install cantor ( a mathematical frontend for sage, maxima, R and so on).
However in all these process following things must be noted
- Debian and/or Debian based distributions have tremendous package management utility.
- During build process continuous availability of the Internet is a necessity.
- The headers and libraries are included in *-dev packages and hence only the binary is not sufficient for development. Need to install the required development packages.
- On kubuntu in order to run a command from command line with super user previlages use the following $sudo sh -c "make install".
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