[drats_users] Asus Eeee PC dRats install

[Jim Harris]

Dan,

Thanks so much for getting back to me with some details.

I apologize in advance at the length of this post, as it has a lot of the
details of what I have gone through. I don't usually post most of anything
to forums, and do not know much about the etiquette for such long posts.

As far as getting the unit into desktop mode, you can actually access a
terminal window easily by just doing a ctrl-alt-t

This gets you into a terminal window. I did that, and tried to tar the
source files. For some reason, I got a bunch of errors doing the un-zip. The
window is not big enough to see the beginnings of the errors, and I am not
sure of the Linux pipe command to try and capture the output into a log file
for you. The errors I see on the end of the screen before it stopped looked
like this:
   tar:d-rats-0.2.6/d-rats/sessionmgr.py: Cannot utime: Operation not
permitted
   tar:d-rats-0.2.6/d-rats/callsigns.py: Cannot utime: Operation not
permitted
........ Etc,
All of the error messages were like this.
The last two lines were:
   tar:d-rats-0.2.6/: Cannot utime: Operation not permitted
   tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

So, I then tried a different thing. I went back into the GUI and got into
the file manager and did the tar fucntion within the file manager, which
does the unzipping for me. I was able to then get everything uncompressed
into a directory. The file structure I ended up with included a folder:
d-rats-0.2.6, which contained:
   COPYING   d_rats/   d-rats   forms/   images/   setup.py

I then went back to the terminal, and tried to run the d-rats (while in the
d-rats.0.2.6 folder level). I tried just typing d-rats, and got:
     bash: d-rats: command not found

I could not get it to run at all. Next, I went back to the file manager (I
know, I keep going back to the 'comfort zone'), and tried double-clicking on
d-rats. This brought up a text editor that showed the script file you wrote
that starts out with:
   #!/usr/bin/python
   #
   # Copyright 2008 Dan Smith..........

Seeing the first line, I went to investigate the files to see if I could
find that path (I did do this in the terminal...I do remember some of the
Linux commands...). I looked in /usr/bin, and could not find /python.

Now, I did try earlier to see if I had python installed , and when I type
python, I do get into a python prompt, so I assumed it was there.

By the way, this is the python prompt:

Python 2.4.4 (#2, Apr 5 2007, 20:11:18)
[GCC 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", credits" or "license" for more information
>>>

So...not sure what to do next, I thought I would try to install one of the
packages you said would probably be needed. I tried the python-serial first.
At the prompt in the d-rats-0.2.6 directory, I typed:
   apt-get install python-serial

What I got in return was:
  E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13 Permission
denied)
  E: Unable to lock the administraion directory (/var/lib/dpkg), are you
root?

So, I then changed to the root directory, and tried it again...and got the
exact same error message.

At this point, I wondered if running the terminal window in easy mode was
getting in the way, so I did go ahead and enter the full desktop mode (which
also requires a re-boot). I then tried to run d-rats, as well as the install
of python-serial, but got exactly the same results in this mode.

So, as you see, I made a fair amount of progress, in simple terms, but got
into a lost state.

Again, I apologize for the large post, and hope it is not improper to do so.
.if so,  please let me know where I should be communicating such details.

I thank you for your patience in helping me, as I know you, and others, have
your hands full trying to get the email and other things working in d-rats.

73,

Jim
WA3NOA
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