Some notes for Linux/Ubuntu folks on setup

[GavinRay97]

Working through setting this up, ran into a few things and took notes. Thought I would post them here for anyone running across the same.

1. This needs Sonic PI cloned from Github, not the Debian apt repo. You also may need to run sonic-pi/app/server/ruby/bin/compile-extensions.rb

2. It may fail due to missing libaubio (note the "b", not "d"). You will need to sudo apt install libaubio-dev.

3. But there's a good chance that this won't install in one of the places the Ruby FFI gem is looking for that library, so it'll still tell you that you don't have it:

As you can see, the files it say are non-existent are clearly there, it just (as it states) needs better search heuristics. So we cp them to one of the folders it actually looks in 🙄

4. After this, running the extension from VS Code and opening your Ruby file should actually start Sonic Pi. But you may get flooded with this error:

stderr: Cannot create RT messagebuffer thread: Operation not permitted (1)

To fix this, you need to install + open qjackctl and press "Start" prior to running the extension:

I'm running Ubuntu 19.10 for reference.

[mathgeniuszach]

For Arch users:

If you install the "community/sonic-pi" package from the Arch repos, the common paths are MUCH more split up, and you cannot find them in a nice, single folder like you can on Windows. According to the PKGBUILD and this source file from sonic pi, there are a few locations you can find the ruby libraries in:

• /usr/lib/sonic-pi/server (what is expected to be at /home/usr/sonic-pi/app/server)
• /usr/share/sonic-pi/theme/ (what is expected to be at /home/usr/sonic-pi/app/gui/theme, but /app/gui/qt/theme/high_contrast/doc-styles.css does not exist, although it seems to be unused in the current extension)
• /home/$USER/.sonic-pi/log/ (for all of the log related files)

Using these I think it is possible to make this work out of the box with Arch Linux, but I'll probably have to submit a pull request to do so.