[Motmot] getting started with MotMot

[Andrew Straw]

(CCing to the motmot email list, where I prefer these kind of 
discussions to occur so that everyone can benefit.)

Jacobson, Gilad wrote:
> First, we're currently running everything under Windows. From the
> download and installation instruction page it seems that the libcamiface
> will not work on Windows with libdc1394 cameras. Is this so? In that
> case, I'll have to move to linux...
>   
That is true, to the best of my knowledge. (There are repeated reports 
of people getting libdc1394 to work in Windows, but I don't think that 
effort has filtered up into the mainline libdc1394 distribution. I have 
certainly not gotten it to work.)

Furthermore, since I have all the dependencies made as Ubuntu packages, 
it's much, much easier to just test things out on Ubuntu than anywhere 
else -- after installing a fresh Ubuntu, steps 1-8 in 
http://code.astraw.com/projects/motmot/download.html take just a few 
minutes. While Ubuntu 8.04 ("Hardy Heron") is still the "officially 
supported" version of Ubuntu, I have been testing, with success so far, 
9.10 ("Karmic Koala"). Ultimately, the aim with my testing of 9.10, is 
to be ready for 10.04, which will be a long term release of Ubuntu -- 
I'm trying to make the official Ubuntu Motmot packages run well, on the 
long term releases of Ubuntu that come every two years. Anyhow, if you 
feel like trying Karmic, please download and install that version of 
Ubuntu. The installation steps should be nearly identical, just change 
"hardy" to "karmic" everywhere in the instructions.

Having said the above, we have just been working on fview and flytrax 
that appear to work for a few minutes on Windows with Prosilica cameras. 
After that, the program mysteriously hangs forever. So, if we can get 
this problem sorted out, it will be possible to run FView on Windows 
right away with Prosilica cameras. Once upon a time, there were 
libcamiface drivers for the cmu1394 Windows drivers, but those were 
allowed to wither into disrepair so I deleted them. With some work, I 
guess they could be resurrected, but they were never in the same shape 
as the rest of the libcamiface backends.
> Also, how does one generate all the necessary dependencies under
> Windows? I've installed all executables, and when I attempt to run fview
> (I go to the python directory and write in command prompt: python
> Lib\site-packages\motmot\fview\fview.py)
> I get the response:
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "Lib\site-packages\motmot\fview\fview.py", line 6, in <module>
>     import pkg_resources # from setuptools
> ImportError: No module named pkg_resources
>   
This should be a matter of installing setuptools. (I'd like to generate 
a list of dependencies and put it on the webpage.)

Please post anything else you come across that's a stumbling block -- 
it's good for me to know so I can update the docs or fix bugs. I realize 
that despite my efforts documenting these things, there's still a lot 
left undocumented.

-Andrew

-- 
Andrew D. Straw, Ph.D.
California Institute of Technology
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~astraw/