Erlang - Install

I of course first needed an Erlang installation. I am running SuSE 10.2 on my main development machine, no Erlang package was available with the distribution, so I had to do a source install.
I downloaded it from erlang.org, the build went very unproblematic, only caveat was that the package pam-devel was not installed. After successfull build Erlang got installed in /usr/local/lib/erlang.

I then went on to install Yaws as I plan to try out some web-development using Erlang as well, this later turned out to be a lucky move.

As my project need to access the serial port (my GPS receiver connects to USB using the serial profile and as such mounts under Linux as a serial device /dev/ttyUSB0), I need a serial library for Erlang luckily not only one but two exists (named sl and serial) I selected the one named sl, solely based on the fact the it is the newer of the two. To get hold of it I decided to use CEAN (Comprehensive Erlang Archive Network) which is Erlang's pendant to Perl's well known CPAN. I managed to get CEAN installed using their FAQ (not without some trouble though).

So with CEAN working, I fired up my erlang shell and typed cean:install(sl). (note the trailing dot). Success! The sl library got installed under /usr/lib/local/erlang/lib/sl-1.0.

After reading the the sl.txt (placed in the doc subfolder under the sl installation folder) to get a clue of how the library worked.
I eagerly did a P = sl:start(). in the erlang shell. only to be met with:
sh: line 0: exec: sl_drv: not found
#Port<0.100>

Alas something was clearly not working!

Next time I will tell how I got this solved and it includes why it was a lucky move to have installed Yaws.

Moving on

OK, I started this blog after I made the decision to try out new programming languages, and also after reading up on a few of them, actually also after deciding which one I will try to investigate further, so I am already far behind on the blogging (not a very good start).

I tried out and read up on:

• Ruby (including Rails)
• Groovy (including Grails)
• Common Lisp (read Common Lisp tutorial for a great tutorial)
• Erlang (I absolutely recommend reading the Programming Erlang )

What I am going to use a lot more time on is Erlang. I have decided on a small pet project to get started.

A while back I bought a GPS receiver and I will try to get position data from this device using Erlang. This is pretty focused and should be relatively easy, now let us see if that holds...

(To be honest I have already started)