Installing and using the Arduino software on Fedora 17

September 29, 2012

I just did a fresh install of Fedora 17, and now that I have enough Arduino experience under my belt to avoid chasing dead ends, I will tell you how it goes getting things on the air again.

Installing the software

Simple, just do: 
yum install arduino
This gives me:

Add yourself to the "lock" group

This is entirely pointless on my single user system, but the arduino gui insists on using lock files. It will complain bitterly and direct you to the INSTALL file for the rxtx module. What you need to do is to edit the file (as super user) /etc/group, find the line for the group "lock" and add your username to the end of the line. Then you must log out and back in again.

Ignore these messages

Whenever I start the arduino GUI, I get these messages. I just ignore them and things seem to work. I don't know the details, but my take on it is that it is just part of the price you pay for the arduino GUI being written in java. 
Error parsing gtk-icon-sizes string: ''
WARNING:  RXTX Version mismatch
	Jar version = RXTX-2.2
	native lib Version = RXTX-2.2pre2

No Java worries

In the past, I went through all kinds of grief trying to install the official java from Sun (now Oracle). This is pointless as near as I can tell (but back then I was getting obscure errors and was trying everything). The OpenJDK which gets installed by default as part of Fedora does just fine for running the arduino GUI.
Don't worry, be happy.

Be sure and use the Fedora packages via yum

The Fedora folks (or the package maintainer for the arduino package anyway), have made Fedora specific tweaks to the arduino GUI and related packages. Among perhaps other things, they have tweaked the rxtx package to be aware of the unique location of lock files on a fedora system. So, if you download the arduino GUI from the arduino site, you will have to rediscover and fix these issues. The lazy mans approach is to stick with the fedora packages and let someone else take care of these kinds of things. Don't say I didn't warn you.

There is a package called "uisp"

At some stage of my dealings with AVR microcontrollers (and Arduinos) this will be worth looking into. It is by no means necessary for developing Arduino projects using the arduino GUI. The uisp package claims to be a Universal In-System Programmer for Atmel AVR and 8051 devices. It describes itself as a "utility for downloading/uploading programs to AVR devices". Odds are that I might want this if I wanted to use the ISP header and cable to replace the bootloader or some such. I am filing this under the category of "things to remember" when and if I get deeper into the Arduino hardware.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org