HOW TO INSTALL THE ZINC CHAT CLIENT

by Na'Tosha Dover

OVERVIEW

As my own personal tribute to the project, this is a step-by-step VERY detailed how-to on how to install the Zinc chat client. It is my hope that it will not only help linux newbies install the application, but teach them a few fundamental commands as well. You may be able to install just fine by reading the Zinc README after you extract the files from the tarball, but if you don't even know how to get that far, or if that isn't enough, this how-to should help. At the moment, it is specific to the zinc-1.1pre2 release, and favours the .tar.gz format. Change filenames where necessary, according to the zinc homepage at http://zinc.sourceforge.net. If you want, you can download the .tar.bz2, but step 5 is going to be different for you.

This how-to assumes that you have the necessary dependencies, and also assumes that you have the "wget" application. The wget homepage can be found at http://wget.sunsite.dk/

PREREQUISITES

Check your python dependency by typing python -V at the command line. It needs to say that you have Python 2.1 or greater for zinc to work. (See steps 1-2 below on how to make sure you're at the command prompt)

You also have to have the curses library. You can check this by typing whereis curses at the command prompt. The output needs to have /usr/include/curses.h in it.

For more information about how to update these packages, if you need to, see the "REFERENCES" section below. There you will find links to the homepages of the respective packages, where you can find more information. Also look to see if your distribution has a specific package managemnt system you can use to update these packages (such as apt-get, slapt-get, portage, etc).

This how-to also assumes that you know how to open some sort of terminal to get to a command prompt, or you can go through the entire how-to in text mode.

Please note that Zinc does NOT run on Sun Solaris OS or NetBSD.

PROCEDURE

1. Open a konsole in KDE, gnome-terminal in Gnome, or some other terminal.

2. You'll have something that looks like this:
   
   username@localhost directory $
   
   This is the command prompt.
   
   The $ means that you're logged into a non-root user's shell. When you are logged into root's shell, it will say:
   
   root@localhost directory #
   
   or something similar. You can also check to see which user you are logged in as by typing whoami at the command prompt.

3. We're going to use an application called "wget" to download Zinc. Type or copy and paste this into the command line, and press enter:
   
   wget http://www.larvalstage.com/zinc/files/zinc-1.1pre2.tar.gz
   
   You should see some output that looks like this:
   
   username@localhost directory $ wget http://www.larvalstage.com/zinc/files/zinc-1.1pre2.tar.gz
   --20:33:15-- http://www.larvalstage.com/zinc/files/zinc-1.1pre2.tar.gz
   => `zinc-1.1pre2.tar.gz'
   Resolving www.larvalstage.com... 24.168.145.62
   Connecting to www.larvalstage.com[24.168.145.62]:80... connected.
   HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
   Length: 134,501 [application/x-tar]
   
   100%[====================================>] 134,501 44.80K/s
   
   
   20:33:19 (44.66 KB/s) - `zinc-1.1pre2.tar.gz' saved [134501/134501]
   
   

4. Now that we've downloaded the tarball with ssh, we can check to see that it's there. Assuming that you were in your home directory (which is where you'll be at by default), type ls zinc-1.1pre2.tar.gz at the command prompt -- you should see the tarball listed:
   
   username@localhost directory $ ls zinc-1.1pre2.tar.gz
   zinc-1.1pre2.tar.gz
   

5. The suffix ".tar.gz" means that the package is a tarball, that has been compressed with gzip. Before we can do anything, we have to uncompress, and untar the archive. We'll do that with the tar command:
   
   tar -zxvf zinc-1.1pre2.tar.gz
   
   Typing this at the command prompt and pressing enter should produce output like:
   
   username@localhost directory $ tar -zxvf zinc-1.1pre2.tar.gz
   zinc-1.1pre2/
   zinc-1.1pre2/src/
   zinc-1.1pre2/src/URLList.py
   zinc-1.1pre2/src/zinc
   zinc-1.1pre2/src/Util.py
   zinc-1.1pre2/src/Mutes.py
   .....
   
   Note: The output will be much longer than this.
   
   When using the tar command with these flags, the "z" will gzip a non-zipped tarball, or gunzip a gzipped tarball (you know a tarball is gziped already when it has .gz at the end of the filename). The "v" means verbose (it is what gives you the listing of the files that are extracted from the archive -- this is optional, but is helpful to let you know when an extraction worked or not). The "x" means to extract the files from the archive (it has to come after the "z", so that the process tries to uncompress, and then extract the files, since it can't be done the other way around), and the "f" means to use the archive file listed.
   

6. Now that we have unzipped, and extracted the tarball, we need to change directories to the Zinc directory. We'll do this with the "cd" command, by typing cd zinc-1.1pre2 at the command line. In most terminals, you could type "cd zinc" and press the [TAB] key to complete the directory name:
   
   username@localhost directory $ cd zinc-1.1pre2
   
   After doing this, you should have a prompt that looks something like:
   
   username@localhost zinc-1.1pre2 $
   

7. We have to be logged into the root shell in order to install Zinc. To do this, we have to su to root. Do this by typing su at the command prompt. You'll be given the Password: prompt. Enter the root password, and press enter (NOTE: for security reasons, you won't see the password showing up in the terminal as you type it) After this is complete, you should be logged into root's shell:
   
   username@localhost zinc-1.1pre2 $ su
   Password:
   root@localhost zinc-1.1pre2 #
   
   If you get a message Invalid login or su: Authentication Failure, then you mis-typed the root password, so just try again.
   

8. Now all you have to do is run the install script by typing ./install.sh at the command prompt. Your output should look something like:
   
   root@localhost zinc-1.1pre2 # ./install.sh
   
   zinc has been successfully installed.
   
   root@localhost zinc-1.1pre2 #
   

9. Now that this is done, you can exit the root shell, by typing exit at the command line:
   
   root@localhost zinc-1.1pre2 # exit
   exit
   username@localhost zinc-1.1pre2 $
   

10. The only thing left to do is to run Zinc! Do this by typing zinc at the command line and pressing enter:
    
    username@localhost directory $ zinc
    
    

REFERENCES