1.4 Configuration and installation

Compiling of the package should be quite straightforward. You have to copy policy.h-dist to policy.h and edit it to set some local policy options, see the comments in that file. (Most default values should be fine, though).

Then, edit the Makefile, to specify installation paths, some system defines and some system dependent libraries (explained there).

After that, a ‘make’ should build the programs and the documentation.

Before you can run ‘make install’ to setup and install everything, make sure that the user that you specified for ‘FAX_OUT_USER’ in Makefile exists in your system. This user will be needed to run faxrunq or faxrunqd, and owns all the outgoing fax queue (this has been changed for 1.1.29 - earlier versions had the fax queue world writeable, which was a security problem).

If your compiler complains about the #ident lines I use for RCS, please run make noident, that will take care of those lines (this is only needed if the compiler refuses to go on - some compilers complain, but go on anyways).

If you get an error message about “unresolved symbols” when linking, you may have to tell the package whether you have the select(S) or poll(S) system calls, by defining -DUSE_SELECT or -DUSE_POLL flags in the Makefile (If you don’t know it, try both, until the error goes away). If it’s not related to select or poll, please check the systems man pages which libraries to link, and add appropriate -l<library> statements to LIBS.

If your system has neither the select(S) call nor the poll(S) call, mgetty is not fully operational—these functions are the only way to prevent mgetty from eating up characters when some other process is trying to dial out.

You can use mgetty anyway, by specifying -DUSE_READ in the Makefile, but beware: with this, mgetty will eat up at least one character of the modem response when another program is dialing out. That may lead to disastrous results if e.g. the ‘CONNECT’ string is thus corrupted, but most of the time, the character that mgetty eats away will be an cr or nl or part of the command that the modem echoes back.

If you have any problems compiling mgetty and sendfax (on a Unix-like system—I do not support MS-DOS or Windows!), please contact me. But make sure that you have read the documentation!

Later on in this document you can find some more detailed instructions about specific operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, and so on).