Installation instructions for distcc -*- indented-text -*- distcc is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. distcc comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, for details see the licence. If you find distcc useful, please consider donating to the Samba Foundation to help cover our costs in publishing free software. (Please mention distcc in your donation.) Please report any problems to distcc@lists.samba.org. Prerequisites ------------- To build distcc you need GNU Make A C compiler You can optionally have libpopt If this is not found on your system, it will be statically linked in. Python >=2.0 To run the test suite with "make maintainer-check" or the benchmark. linuxdoc SGML tools To rebuild the documentation from its SGML source. autoconf >=2.5 To rebuild the configure scripts if you edit configure.ac. To build the optional GNOME monitor (--with-gnome), you need the GNOME2 development libraries, and in particular gtk+ >=2.0 libgnome >=2.0 libgnomeui >= 2.0 libglade >= 2.0 libpango The monitor can also be built without GNOME desktop integration (--with-gtk), in which case you need only gtk+ >=2.0 libglade >= 2.0 Preliminaries ------------- distcc can be installed and used without requiring root access. Adjust directories appropriately when installing. Compiling distcc ---------------- Compilation follows the standard GNU pattern: $ ./configure --help $ ./configure $ make # make install Note that the default GNU "sysconfdir" is /usr/local/etc. You may want to change this to /etc. $ ./configure --sysconfdir=/etc You can set an installation prefix if you want to put distcc in /opt: $ ./configure --prefix=/opt/distcc/ distcc needs to be installed on all client and server machines. If you would like a graphical client-side monitor to show running jobs, you can choose either --with-gnome or --with-gtk. If you would like to try running distcc over IPv6, use --enable-rfc2553. You must have a reasonably recent operating system or this is likely to fail in complex ways. Starting the daemon ------------------- This stage is only required if you want to run distcc over TCP sockets, rather than SSH connections. TCP is faster but less secure and should only be used on trusted networks. In TCP mode distccd can run either from inetd or as a standalone daemon. Running standalone is recommended. To run standalone, run a command like this, either from the command line or from the system startup scripts. distccd --daemon If the daemon is started from an rc script, then make sure that it sees a PATH setting which can find any compilers installed in nonstandard directories. You should create a "distcc" account on server machines so that distcc can run with minimal privilege. It is not necessary for this account to own any files or have a home directory. If this account doesn't exist, distccd uses the "nobody" account. By default distccd writes messages to the "daemon" syslog, which typically ends up in /var/log/messages or /var/log/daemon. You can set IP-based access control using the --allow and --listen options, in either inetd or daemon mode: distccd --allow 10.4.20.0/24 distccd does not need to run on machines that will only act as clients. See the manual for more information. Set up the host list -------------------- On the client machines, store a list of servers names in ~/.distcc/hosts. If you're using TCP connections, it should look like this: localhost red green blue For SSH connections localhost @red @green @blue The hosts should be listed in descending order of speed. localhost should normally be first, unless it is signficantly slower than another machine. See the manual for more information. Create the masquerade directories --------------------------------- The easiest way to use distcc is in "masquerade" mode, where it is installed on the path to "catch" calls to the compiler and redirect them over the network. Other options are discussed in the manual. For instance, you could create the directory named /usr/lib/distcc/bin and populate it with links. # mkdir /usr/lib/distcc/bin # cd /usr/lib/distcc/bin # ln -s ../../../bin/distcc gcc # ln -s ../../../bin/distcc cc # ln -s ../../../bin/distcc g++ # ln -s ../../../bin/distcc c++ Do this for all compiler names that you use. Then, to use distcc, a user just needs to put the directory /usr/lib/distcc/bin early in the PATH and distcc will handle the rest. export PATH=/usr/lib/distcc/bin:$PATH Use with ccache --------------- The best way to use is to set up a similar masquerade directory for ccache, and put it on the path before distcc. Complete the survey ------------------- Once you have distcc working for your own application, please complete and mail in the survey in survyey.txt.