[pvrusb2] Perl and fwextract.pl [was: pvrusb2 Digest, Vol 51, Issue 8]

[Mike Isely]

On Sun, 15 Nov 2009, Joel Mayer wrote:

> 
>   Dear Mister Isely-
> 
>   I have both versions of your firmware extractor and both versions of
>   Steve Toth's drivers sitting idle on my desktop. The last time I
>   commented you replied- "My extractor is a Perl script. If you have
>   Perl installed my extractor will do its job automagically."
> 
>   I went in to the software library on my SuSE 11.1 install DVD 
>   through Yast. There are well over a hundred Perl this and Perl that
>   options which I am able to install. More specifically (you are typing
>   with a noob) which: sub-assembly, or module, or component, of Perl
>   should I install?
> 
>   Thanks / Joel Mayer
> 

Joel:

The requirements for fwextract.pl to run should be no different than any 
other typical Perl program.  There's really nothing at all special about 
fwextract.pl - it's just a Perl program.

I'm not familiar enough with SuSE to give you an exact answer about 
which package(s) to install, but if that distro is set up like Debian 
is, then just finding the package named "perl" and installing it should 
be enough.  All those zillion other Perl related packages are probably 
additional libraries and API wrappers that allow Perl to do more stuff.  
Perl also comes with a giant pile of additional libraries, and while 
fwextract.pl uses a few of them, the ones it uses are all considered to 
be part of a "standard" Perl installation.  Said another way, if you 
install package "perl" then probably the distro's dependencies will 
likely also pull in whatever related stuff you might need.

Just to be really, really clear: If you run the command "perl -v", do 
you get anything?  One thing I probably haven't been clear enough on is 
that there's really two ways to execute fwextract.pl.  One is just 
"fwextract.pl" while the other is "perl fwextract.pl".  The first method 
is more intuitive but it won't work unless the file execute bit is set.  
The second method always works but requires a bit more typing and the 
driver documentation doesn't really talk about that.  (But anyone who 
has run scripts before in Linux would probably already know this.  Guess 
I should clarify the documentation.)

  -Mike

-- 

Mike Isely
isely @ isely (dot) net
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