I finally got an install script for linux users written and tested. It will install all dependencies of fr0st, including downloading and compiling flam3. So far it has only be tested under Ubuntu 10.04, so I’d appreciate any feedback from people installing fr0st on other releases/distros.
The file will start to be distributed with the 1.2 version of fr0st. For now, you can get it directly from here:
This can be used to run code from the 1.1 release (http://launchpad.net/fr0st/trunk/1.1.0/+download/fr0st-1.1-src.tgz) as well as the development version from the bazaar repo (“bzr branch lp:fr0st fr0st”)
If you run into any problem using this file, please let me know so I can make corrections. Thanks!
The Fr0st Blog 
What if I also have the electricsheep and flam3 packages from 10.04’s universe repository installed? Your script will overwrite the installed flam3 2.7 with flam3 2.8, probably rendering electricsheep inoperable. Is it possible to compile flam3 2.8 without installing it and then pointing fr0st to these files?
Yes, it’s possible. Just skip the “sudo make install” line and manually arrange for the .so files to be on your path. One hacky way to do this is to create a [fr0st root]/fr0stlib/pyflam3/linux_so folder and put the files in there.
It’s very unfortunate that electric sheep is not yet up to date with the latest flam3 version, which is the only reason you even need a workaround like this.
Hope this helps!
Cool, it works! Seems like a good solution. Maybe the script should check for the presence of the flame3 package and perform this hack itself instead of calling make install.
Thanks for your help!
Where is [fr0st root]? Also I can’t find any .so files. What I did was took the script and put a # in front of sudo make install. I didn’t get any errors but I don’t know what to do from here.
Well, the sudo make install is necessary to put the resulting .so into /usr/lib. If you skip this step, the compiled files should end up in the flam3-2.8-src directory.
Thanks, I don’t know why but I couldn’t find the .so files. I ended up running the script with the make install and that worked fine and it didn’t break my electric sheep screensaver so I’m happy. I’m especially happy to have this on Ubuntu. Now to play with it. Could you point me somewhere that shows me how to make animations?
Depends what kind of animation. You’ll need some kind of script. An example that comes included with the fr0st download is scripts/sheep_tools/sheep_loop.py
Perhaps. Then again, I’m not sure it’s actually necessary, as I think electric sheep uses a binary version of flam3, while fr0st uses it as a lib. I haven’t looked at this issue in detail.
Anyway, glad you got it up and running!
Amazing work mate!
I wonder if you could post a tutorial on scripting. or atleast links where I can find them.
Thanks
Well, there’s no tutorial available yet. However, there are a couple of ways how you can get started.
First of all, you should be somewhat familiar with the python programming language. You could start here, for example: http://docs.python.org/tutorial/index.html
You should be able to find out how most things are done by looking at existing scripts. If you have any specific questions, you can always ask (on the mailing list, the #fr0st-users IRC channel on freenode, or email me algorias AT gmail DOT com)