87 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
87 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
# TeraHz build guide
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The recommended way of getting TeraHz is the official Raspberry Pi SD card image
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provided under the releases tab in the GitHub repository. Installing TeraHz from
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source is a time consuming and painful process, even more so if you don't know
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what you're doing, and whatever you end up building __will not be officially
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supported__ (unless you're a core developer).
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With this warning out of the way, let's begin.
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## Getting the latest sources
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The most reliable way to get working source code is by cloning the official
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GitHub repository and checking out the `development-working` tag. This tag marks
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the latest confirmed working commit. Building from the master branch is somewhat
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risky, and building from development branches is straight up stupid if you're
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not a developer.
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After cloning and checking out, check the documentation for module dependencies
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and the required version of python in the `docs/dependencies.md` file.
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## Installing Python
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This step depends a lot on the platform you're using. TeraHz was developed with
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Raspberry Pi and Raspbian in mind. If you're familiar with Raspbian enough,
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you'll know that the latest version of Python available is `3.5`, which is too
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obsolete to run TeraHz and the required modules consistently. This leaves us
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with compiling Python from source. __This step is guaranteed to be slow,
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overnight compiling with something like tmux is recommended.__
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### Pre-requirements
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Installing python without most C libraries will lead to a rather minimalistic
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Python install, missing a lot of important modules. To prevent this, update
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the system packages. After that, reboot.
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```
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sudo apt update
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sudo apt full-upgrade
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sudo reboot
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```
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Install the required build tools, libraries and their headers.
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```
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sudo apt-get install build-essential tk-dev libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev libreadline6-dev libdb5.3-dev libgdbm-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libbz2-dev libexpat1-dev liblzma-dev zlib1g-dev
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```
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### Compiling
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Compiling Python from source is, in fact pretty easy, just time-consuming. I'll
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advise you again to use a terminal multiplexer like `tmux` to start the build
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process, detach the terminal session overnight and reattach it some time later
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to check on it.
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Python 3.6.8 can be downloaded in many forms, but you'll be using the most basic
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of them all: a gzipped tarball. Download and decompress it, the cd into its
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directory.
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```
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wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.6.8/Python-3.6.8.tgz
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tar -xzf Python-3.6.8.tgz
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cd Python-3.6.8
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```
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Python's build process is pretty classic, a `.configure` script and a Makefile.
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Using the `-j` option with Make can reduce the compile time significantly. Go
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with as many threads as you have cores: `-j 4` works great on the Pi 3 B/B+.
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```
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./configure
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make -j4
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```
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When the compilation ends, install your freshly built version of python.
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```
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sudo make altinstall
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```
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Altinstall means that the new version of Python will be installed beside the
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existing version, and all related commands will use the full naming scheme:
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think `python3.6` or `pip3.6` instead of the shorter `python3` or `pip3`.
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### Modules
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Another painfully slow part is the installation of all the required modules needed
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by TeraHz. Luckily, `pip3.6` takes care of the entire installation process. You might also want to run this command through a terminal multiplexer overnight, as it takes a few hours to complete.
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```
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pip3.6 install smbus pyserial flask pandas
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```
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