Ubuntu
libftdi package

undocumented installation

Asked by Scott Mayo

I'm sure it's trivially obvious to people who routinely install libraries from source, but I'm from the windows world, where you download a library and .h and off you go. Here, I downloaded the libfdti-0.20 (zesty) and unpacked it. Seeing no instructions, I took a guess and type ./configure, which did a bunch of stuff, and then typed make, which did a bunch of stuff. (Both set the exit code to 0 so I assume they're happy.)

I'd expect to find a .h and a .a or usable .o after that. I found the .h. I found a .o, but linking with it generated a bunch of undefined symbols, so it's clearly not the whole story. I don't see a .a anywhere. More to the point, why doesn't README explain in small words what to do and how to use the result?

An answer telling me what to do is fine, but this is a plea to get people to document in large friendly letters what to do and how to do it, with as few assumptions as possible. Thanks.

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Manfred Hampl
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Best Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#1

You are misunderstanding the concepts for software installation in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu contains a package management system, and you install pre-built packages with the help of it.

If you need the .a and .o files, then you should install libftdi-dev with one of the package management programs (Ubuntu-software, or synaptic, or with the command "sudo apt-get install libftdi-dev").

In case that you really want to start by downloading the source for an Ubuntu package for compiling, then you should read the Ubuntu wiki about compiling packages, or even go back to the Debian developer documentation.

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Scott Mayo (scottmayo) said : 		#2

Thanks. Part of the problem was that I didn't know apt-get was an option or what name to get. Some sites said "Ubunto already has ftdi support" and I was worried about disturbing existing software. But the apt_get worked fine and now I can link with -lftdi .

I'd still say that documentation could be better. To the newbie, -lftdi-dev would have made sense, and the fact that man ftdi or man ftdi-dev still doesn't work is confusing. I found ftdi.h and can probably guess my way through using it based on examples, but this still isn't newbie friendly.

But I think I can take it from here, thanks.