How to build Pd-extended on the Raspberry Pi

It was quite an ordeal, but I managed to build Pd-extended (Puredata with a bunch of externals) on my Raspberry Pi running Debian Squeeze.  I also uploaded my finished package (.deb) to puredata.info, see below for details.  Here’s what you need to do:

1. Firstly, your SD card’s partition is probably not large enough to accomodate all the files we’ll need, so we have to expand it to fit your card first.  From a terminal session on your Pi:

   1. printf "d\n3\nd\n2\nn\np\n2\n157696\n\nw\n" | sudo fdisk -cu /dev/mmcblk0

   2. sudo reboot

   3. sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2

2. We need to add the repositories for the source to aptitude:

   sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

   Move to the bottom and paste this in and save (ctrl+o):

   deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main
   deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main

3. Update your aptitude cache:

   sudo apt-get update

4. We’ll need  to install a whole bunch of dependencies for building Pd and all the various externals.  This took like 4 days to manually figure out:

   sudo apt-get install rsync autoconf libfftw3-dev liblua5.1-0-dev swig libvorbis-dev ladspa-sdk libspeex-dev libmp3lame-dev lua5.1

5. Copy the source:

   rsync -av --delete rsync://128.238.56.50/distros/pd-extended/ pd-extended/

6. Since it will take a while, you may want to use this command to detach the process from your terminal session and log the output to a file:

   nohup rsync -av --delete rsync://128.238.56.50/distros/pd-extended/ pd-extended/ > rsync.log &

7. Build the main Pd dependencies:

   sudo apt-get build-dep puredata gem pdp

8. For some reason I had to change one of the externals’ makefile to get it to build correctly. Open /externals/OSCx/src/Makefile (I used nano), go to line 20 and remove “-lpd” so it looks like this:

   LIBS = -L../../../pd/bin -lc -lm

9. OK, we’re now ready to actually start building. This will take a long time, hours most likely. I did it piecemeal so I can’t say for sure how long it takes from start to finish.

10. cd pd-extended/packages/linux_make

11. nohup make install > makeinstall.log &

12. While you’re still logged in, you can monitor that logfile by doing

    tail -f makeinstall.log

13. Once that finishes, you should see “linux_make install succeeded!” Yay! If you encounter any errors please post them here and we’ll see what I missed.
14. Now we can make the actual Debian package that you can install like any other program:

    nohup make package > makepackage.log &

15. If you previously installed Puredata vanilla (as per my previous post), you’ll need to uninstall that first:

    sudo apt-get --purge remove puredata

16. For convenience I uploaded this package to puredata.info.  All you have to do is download that file to your RPi:

    wget -O Pd-0.43.1-extended-20120606.deb http://download.puredata.info/pd-extended-rpi/releases/1.0/Pd-0.43.1-extended-20120606.deb

17. Finally, let’s install it:

    sudo dpkg -i Pd-0.43.1-extended-20120606.deb

18. If everything goes well, you now have Pd-extended on your Raspberry Pi! Here’s a new test patch that uses Freeverb~ for you to test, like so:

    pd-extended -nogui -noadc -alsa testPatchExtended.pd

19. Presently, I’m getting some serious noise and I think it has something to do with the ALSA driver still being in beta. Looking into it. If any other linux hackers have any ideas, please let me know!