Building Accerciser from Source (on openSUSE)

I have been using Accerciser for a few months now to aid in my Mono accessibility work, but until now I had been using it in openSUSE 10.3. With the release of openSUSE 11, I had to rebuild it from source. Of course, that meant figuring out all the dependencies again. Since this will happen every time we get a new openSUSE release to test on, I decided to make of note of things this time to reference in the future.

All I did was created a tiny shell script that uses zypper to install the packages that I needed to have in order for Accerciser to configure and compile correctly. Of course, this is openSUSE specific, but it probably useful for other distros (in that you might be able to determine which packages you possibly need):

#!/bin/sh

# accerciser_prep.sh

zypper in gconf2-devel orbit2-devel indent libidl-devel popt-devel glib2-devel pcre-devel libstdc++-devel glib-devel libstdc++43 glibc-devel glib linux-kernel-headers automake autoconf m4 intltool gettext-tools cvs libgomp43 gnome-common gnome-doc-utils-devel libxml-devel ncurses-devel readline-devel tack gcc gcc43 libmudflap43 make zlib-devel IPython

Then just grab Accerciser ( svn co svn+ssh://[login@]svn.gnome.org/svn/accerciser/trunk accerciser ) and run configure, make, and make install! Note that these are the packages that are needed after a default install of openSUSE 11 on my test machines; Accerciser has other requirements, many of which were installed on the OS by default.

By the way, Accerciser 1.34 was released semi-recently (June 16). Accerciser is an interactive Python accessibility explorer for the GNOME desktop. It uses AT-SPI to inspect and control widgets, allowing you to check if an application is providing correct information to assistive technologies and automated test frameworks. I recommend it for anyone involved with accessibility, but also anyone who develops or tests applications! For a good introduction on accessibility and to see how Accerciser can be used, check out Steven Lee's article entitled "Python Powered Accessibility." The article was published recently in Python Magazine;

Comparison: C#, IronPython, and Boo

Over the last few days I have been using and comparing a few of the different Mono related languages that are out there, namely C#, IronPython, and Boo. After working in each one, I thought it might be helpful to have some sort of reference for people who want to quickly learn more about using .NET on Linux, people who want to quickly compare some of the basic differences in the languages, or for people who are just learning to program. With that in mind, I put together a little crash course on some of the basics of each language, enjoy: http://bean.wikidot.com/comparecsharpironpythonboo.

As a side note, I thought wikidot was a pretty neat service.