It’s late and I have been trying to install Bespin locally on my laptop which is running linux distro openSUSE 11.2 using XFCE desktop enviornment..and after several and several attempts… I finally got it up and running!

Initially I followed the instructions on https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Bespin/UserGuide#Python_server but then I did not find the instructions clear enough, atleast for a newbie like me!

However I would like to share the steps I took to make this installation a successfull one and the errors I ran into while doing so and the steps I took to resolve them.

1.) Get the Bespin code on your machine, if “hg” command does not work for you then you  need to install Mercurial.
hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/labs/bespinclient
hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/labs/bespinserver

2.) Change to “bespinclient” directory

3.) Execute “python bootstrap.py —no-site-packages”

4.)Execute  “source bin/activate”

5.)Execute “paver install_server”

First time It started to build It came across an error saying
“unable to execute gcc: No such file or directory
error: command ‘gcc’ failed with exit status 1”

So then I thought hmm I guess I don’t have the gcc compiler installed, so then I installed it and ran the “paver install_server” command again. Hoping that it was going to work this time…well another error occured and this one kind of confused me but I figured it was missing Headers for python, well atleast something along those lines. So then I ended up opening my YaST2 control panel and I checked to see what was installed under “Python Development”. I saw two packages “python-cairo-devel” and “python-gnome-devel” both were regarding “Headers”. I installed both packages and ran “paver install_server” command again.. and it Finally worked “Successfully Installed”, I was able to move on to the next step, which was creating the db.

6.) Execute “paver create_db”

7.) Execute “paver start”

8.) DONE:D

After all that I was able to access Bespin locally from my browser using http://127.0.0.1:4020/editor/(Dont forget “/editor/”  otherwise it might not work).

Installation was not simple at first,because the errors that I encountered scared me but after breaking down the problem into smaller steps, I was able to get the job done!