Installing Erlang OTP on Asus EEE Pc

From Erlang Community

[edit] Author

Michal Ptaszek

[edit] Introduction

[edit] Asus EEE Pc

In the end of 2007 Asus, in cooperation with Intel, created a tiny notebook and named it EEE Pc. With its ultra-small size (7" LCD and 0.92 kg weight) it became a very powerful tool as a portable workspace.

You can find more information about Asus EEE Pc on:

Official producer's site

Wikipedia's article

[edit] Xandros

Xandros is a Debian-based, commercial Linux distribution which has been chosen as a one of the operating systems preinstalled on Asus notebooks.

More information about Xandors to be found on:

Wikipedia's article

Producer's site

[edit] Installing Erlang/OTP

In this tutorial we will deal with installing Erlang/OTP from prebuilt packages (it is also possible to build it from sources - but mainly because of the compiling time I've decided to skip that version).

[edit] Some initial information

  $ run this command as a normal user
  # run this command as a root

In order to work as a root we should type sudo before each root command or type sudo bash to work as an administrator.

  $ uname -a
  Linux eeepc-erlang 2.6.21.4-eeepc #2 Mon Oct 15 12:49:37 EDT 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[edit] Preparing the system

At first, we must add new repository to our sources.list file

  # echo "deb http://ftp.pl.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
  # apt-get update

After that, we are ready to install some packages which will be helpful in the future. We will install openssl (required for encryption support), java-jdk (for jinterface), unixODBC and some external database server (for example MySQL or PostgreSQL). Unfortunately, prebuilt packages for Erlang/OTP have odbc support disabled - so if we want to use it - we have to compile Erlang/OTP from source. The proper tutorial is available at another TrapExit tutorial.

  # apt-get -y install openssl sun-java6-jdk unixodbc libmyodbc mysql-server mysql-client

In case we wanted to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL we would replace libmyodbc mysql-server mysql-client with odbc-postgresql postgresql.

[edit] Installing Erlang/OTP

After have successfully installed every additional package we are ready to install the Erlang/OTP package. All we need is to run:

  # apt-get -y install erlang

[edit] Compiling Erlang from sources

Because Asus EEE Pc doesn't have any pre-installed developer tools, before we can compile something, we need some system upgrades. We will need at least gcc and g++ compilers with standard libraries.

  # apt-get -y install make gcc libc6-dev g++ libstdc++6.4.1-dev

After installing all these packages we can use this tutorial to set up Erlang with odbc support.