namecoind oddities in Slackware

[coinfarmer]

I recently was able to get namecoind running in Slackware64 14.1 for the purposes of integrating with nmcontrol and FreeSpeechMe. The standard github repo at https://github.com/namecoin/namecoin does not have a makefile.unix included for building the daemon (although using Qt-creator to build the GUI wallet seems to work okay after several dependencies are installed but this doesn't work with FreeSpeechMe, so the daemon is required for that). Here's what I needed to do in order to be able to resolve domain names directly from a NMC blockchain:

1) Get this set of SlackBuilds:

https://github.com/nomnombtc/slackbuilds

2) Edit the namecoin.SlackBuild file to update the build version number to match the one currently available. For example, I had to change line 26 from this:

Code: Select all

VERSION=${VERSION:-git071012}

to this:

Code: Select all

VERSION=${VERSION:-git281114}

3) You should now be ready to build by typing

Code: Select all

sudo sh namecoin.SlackBuild 

followed by

Code: Select all

sudo installpkg /tmp/namecoin-git281114-x86_64-1_nnb.tgz

or whatever the exact location and name of the package that results is.

Note that running this version of namecoind works fine with nmcontrol and FreeSpeechMe as expected, bugs and all, but it produces a version of the blockchain database file that is incompatible with the Qt-GUI version. If you run the Qt wallet after syncing this namecoind, the GUI wallet will reindex the blockchain in a way that namecoind cannot read, and you have to resync namecoind from scratch before it will work again. My workaround for this is to have two separate directories, one I call .namecoind and another I call .namecoin-qt, each of which I rename to simply .namecoin depending on what features I need to have access to before running the appropriate client.

Also, I had tried a handful of approaches before this that failed miserably. So I'm not sure what, if any dependencies are needed before this set of instructions will work as described. I'm confident that the necessary dependencies are in the standard repos though, I don't recall going out of my way to install any dependencies that required extra work beyond the usual install process. Thusly, YMMV.

[biolizard89]

I'm under the impression that you can just run "make" from the src/ directory and it should build namecoind. Haven't done this in a while, so I could be wrong.

[coinfarmer]

I'm under the impression that you can just run "make" from the src/ directory and it should build namecoind. Haven't done this in a while, so I could be wrong.

Quite possibly, didn't work on my machine though. Seems like my version of Boost is too new and I had a harder time finding an old version of libboost that worked on my system than using this method. Maybe what you describe could work on another flavor of Linux. I might give it a try in a VM to test it out.

[coinfarmer]

Maybe what you describe could work on another flavor of Linux. I might give it a try in a VM to test it out.

I just checked this in the latest version of Linux Mint for comparison. After installing the Bitcoin PPA for Ubuntu to get the required dependencies (specifically libdb4.7* stuff), the build worked flawlessly as you describe, producing a working namecoind. Cool!

I still can't get it to build on Slackware 14.1 though using the standard method. I'm running into boost dependency issues. Hmmmmm..

No matter, all is well for now. I just thought I'd update the thread to note that this seems Slackware specific.