OpenViBE and Debian packages

Debian packages for OpenViBE have been a long time feature request… it may have been one of the firsts after the 2009 public release ! The neurodebian distro even had a TODO item to get a clean OpenViBE integration in their distro… Unfortunately, this whole interest did not end up with a clean package so far.

Almost one year from now, I took a couple of days to give it a try but being a debian package master needs quite some time. After several iterations, my work was left unfinished sleeping on my harddrive. However, it seems like things are moving on at neurodebian and that some people are actually getting into it and want to make it happen Probably the right time to share the stuff I’ve done, far from final but already a start.

I split the project as two different packages, one for the dependencies and one for OpenViBE itself.

• The dependencies package includes all the dependencies that were compiled from sources by the linux-install_dependencies. Other dependencies are of course left to the package manager. For faster/easier work, I decided to put all these dependencies in the /usr/lib/openvibe folder.
• The OpenViBE package contains what normally ends up in the dist folder when you use linux-build. It also contains a few launcher scripts that properly start the applications.

So what’s left to be done ?

• There are several warnings from debuild that should be corrected.
• The working directory should be changed to a user-writeable directory as OpenViBE normally uses the dist folder as a working directory. For this to be done, patching the openvibe.conf file could be very handy.
• And whatever “make it even more clean” stuff that would be needed for being up to the debian (great) standards

This configuration has been tested on OpenViBE 0.10.0 under Ubuntu 10.04 both i386 & amd64 and can be downloaded here.

I hope this can help the neurodebian team to make this happen and that we soon have a stable OpenViBE package for debian based distros !