Chapter 2. Walkthrough Guide

The Aldrin walkthrough should give you a quick and helpful introduction into Aldrin. By the end of reading this chapter you will know how to install Aldrin, load generators and effects, write patterns and arrange those patterns in a sequence.

2.1. Installation

Aldrin is open source and therefore its releases are source code only - no binaries. If you use a popular distribution of GNU/Linux, chances are that your local package manager already offers an Aldrin package. If not, you will need to build Aldrin yourself.

Independent of which distribution you use, building and installing Aldrin shouldn't be hard, given that you follow this guide. If you have trouble installing Aldrin, please contact your distribution maintainers and ask them to include support for Aldrin.

First make sure that you have all programs and libraries installed required to build Aldrin. Usually, all of them should be provided by your distribution of GNU/Linux. Please check with your distributions package manager documentation on how to search and install packages. You are going to need following packages:

Aldrin packages can be downloaded from the SourceForge.net project website. You can either download a release or build Aldrin from the source repository. In this guide, we are going to download a release.

  1. On the project website, click on Downloads to see available releases. You will see the downloads page on which one or more releases are listed.

  2. Download the sources of the most recent release. Usually, the link should be named something like Aldrin x.x Source Release (x86, .tar.bz2), where x.x is the release number.

  3. Unpack the downloaded sources into a new folder. You will get a new subfolder named something like aldrin-x.x:

    [paniq@aspera tmp]$ tar -vxf aldrin-x.x.tar.bz2
    ...
    aldrin-x.x/CREDITS
    aldrin-x.x/INSTALL
    aldrin-x.x/ChangeLog
    aldrin-x.x/LICENCE
  4. Change into the newly created folder and run scons to see if everything is fine:

    [paniq@aspera tmp]$ cd aldrin-x.x
[paniq@aspera aldrin-x.x]$ scons
    scons: Reading SConscript files ...
    scons: done reading SConscript files.
    scons: Building targets ...
    scons: `.' is up to date.
    scons: done building targets.
  5. Please make sure that any previous versions of Aldrin have been uninstalled from your system before proceeding with the next step.

    Now install aldrin to your system (you will need root rights for this):

    [paniq@aspera aldrin-x.x]$ sudo scons install
    Password:
    scons: Reading SConscript files ...
    scons: done reading SConscript files.
    scons: Building targets ...
    Install file: "bin/aldrin" as "/usr/local/bin/aldrin"
    ...
    scons: done building targets.

    If you don't want to install aldrin systemwide, create a folder in your home directory and change your installation prefix:

    [paniq@aspera aldrin-x.x]$ mkdir ~/usr
    [paniq@aspera aldrin-x.x]$ scons install PREFIX=/home/paniq/usr
    scons: Reading SConscript files ...
    scons: done reading SConscript files.
    scons: Building targets ...
    Install file: "bin/aldrin" as "/home/paniq/usr/bin/aldrin"
    ...
    scons: done building targets.

You are now ready to run Aldrin for the first time.