Last modified 3 years ago

Installing Capture on Linux

Linux Capture has been tested on Ubuntu 8.10. Other versions of Linux should work, but are not presently supported.

Basic Requirements

Before downloading Capture, please ensure that you have the following prerequisites:

  •  Adobe AIR
  • Java: Capture requires Java 1.5 or newer. To install Java 6 on Ubuntu, use the command: 
    sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre
  • Qt4: Capture (built with Qt 4.5) requires version 4 or greater of the Qt toolkit from Nokia. To install the necessary components of Qt4 on Ubuntu, use the command: 
    sudo apt-get install libqt4-gui

VGA2USB

Finding the correct Epiphan driver

If you're using VGA2USB, the Epiphan drivers must first be installed. Go  here and find the build which most closely resembles your kernel version. On Epiphan's website, the first part of the file name is the driver version (e.g. "vga2usb-3.20.3.0") and the second part is the kernel that it has been built for (e.g. "2.6.27-7-generic_i386"). You kernel version can be determined using the command: 

uname -r

If there is no Epiphan driver which exactly matches your kernel version, you may have to resort to trial and error to find one which works for you. To test the driver, unzip it, and, in the driver's directory, run the command: 

sudo make load

If there are no error messages, it should work.

If your kernel version is not supported by any of the existing Epiphan drivers, you may have to contact support@… to request that they create a driver build for your version.

Loading the driver on boot

Once you have a working VGA2USB driver, you will likely want to have the driver automatically loaded at boot-time. We have provided the install_vga2usb.sh script to automate this process on Ubuntu 8.10. To install, issue the command: 

./install_vga2usb.sh vga2usb.ko

... where vga2usb.ko is from the Epiphan driver package which worked for you.

On other Linux versions, this script may have to be modified. If you do make changes to the script, please let us know at support@… so that we can incorporate the changes into future releases.

First flight

Extract the Capture tar.gz package into the final installation location (for instance, if you want it installed to /usr/local/Capture, it should be extracted to this location).

The first time through, Capture must be run with super-user privileges. This is required to install the AIR application in the appropriate location. On subsequent runs, it should be possible to run Capture with ordinary user privileges.