Maybe you’re bored of the “Crashplan x Raspberry Pi” posting I’ve done lately – sorry and all that, but I hope this might be helpful to someone. The main post has been updated a couple of times, it’s getting a bit messy with edits, so probably if I need to make any more I will have to make a brand new post.
This post is for anyone experimenting with the Raspberry Pi (or another ARM based board) who knows the command line but isn’t big on compiling from source – you can do it, and someone probably has done something similar before! Use your google-fu, try to get an overall understanding of the instructions you find out there, but don’t sweat the detail too much unless it breaks.
So as far as I’m aware, I’m the only one writing instructions on this particular combination of hardware and software, but I know lots of other people have done similar things with the same software and different hardware. Then Raspbian was released, using ‘hard float’ instead of ‘soft float’ to speed up software. Do I know the details of how? Only vaguely – and I know it means a new kernel and potentially new libraries. So I approached my instructions from before with caution, knowing something could go differently.
I first of all did everything exactly the same – just to see. Fail – Crashplan would start and then die. When that happens, look for the logs. I could see that there were two problems, two libraries that wouldn’t load – libjtux.so and libmd5.so. So… To the google machine.
A wise man once said that ‘there’s nothing new under the sun‘ and he wasn’t far from the mark. Turns out, most people who use the phrase libjtux.so are interested in Crashplan, which is handy. Also turns out that searching for armhf libjtux.so gives the top hit as someone who compiled both libraries for armhf on the BeagleBone computer, but decided to share instructions rather than compiled libraries. I’m going the opposite direction, but we need all types.
Following those instructions worked out pretty well, though I had to make sure that they reflected the slightly different paths and versions installed on Wheezy rather than Ubuntu. I also had to check that all the right programs for compilation were installed – adding a full JDK did the trick. I surprised myself that it was so easy to recompile the two libraries and put them in the right path for Crashplan.
Compiling isn’t some kind of mystical computer voodoo, it’s designed to be really quite quick and easy, so long as nothing goes wrong. It’s worth looking for someone else who’s done the same thing and seeing how they did it and remember, even if it all goes wrong, the worst that can happen with the Raspberry Pi is that you need to copy the SD image over again!