Joining the Project

     So this has been a fun night of signing up for all of the different collaboration venues available to the Audacity community. This includes the forums here: http://forum.audacityteam.org/, the IRC channel using the Pidgin chat client, and the developer mailing list. I can't say it was all that eventful, but I did come across a couple of interesting things. First off, joining the mailing list was a piece of cake, just put in your email address, then reply to the activation email that they send you. I have yet to get any messages from them, and I've been on it for a few days now, but I doubt they will send too many emails. Probably only when something relatively big is going on with the project. The next thing I did was sign up for the IRC chat. This was also pretty easy to do following the directions posted on the wiki. There was one thing that didn't match up with the direction, however. One of the steps asks you to register your username so that someone else cannot choose it and impersonate you, and the way to do that is by using NickServ, which was built into Pidgin, from what I understand. As soon as you create your username, it warns you that it is not yet registered, although you can choose to ignore it. The wiki instructed me to use the command:

/msg NickServ register password

where password is the password you used when you created your username. This did not work, however. The error message said that the syntax was wrong and that I needed to include an email after the password in order to register. So I did that, and got an email with another command to paste in the chat client that contained a registration code to complete the registration. I think my first suggestion to the community is going to be to update the IRC instructions to reflect what I experienced, even though it really isn't hard to fix given the error message when you try to do what the wiki says.

     The final thing I've done tonight was sign up on the forums, which is where all the meat is. There were 16 people in the IRC chat when I logged on, but nobody was saying anything, so I started reading the forums. After I signed up, I immediately found the perfect subject to read up on: How to Compile Audacity! Earlier tonight I spent a significant amount of time trying to build and compile Audacity from the source code, but haven't yet been successful, although I think I'm really close. Audacity requires the wxWidgets 2.8.x library and a C++ compiler, CMake, to successfully build. 2.8 is actually not the newest version of the wxWidgets library, it is now up to 3.0, which is the one I downloaded, assuming it would work. Installing this library also required me to install yet another dependency, of course. So after doing that, I figured out how to install the library. Installing CMake was easy, as it's just a simple sudo apt-get install command. Now with all of the dependencies installed, I go to try and build Audacity, but it cannot seem to find the wxWidgets library. Turns out, it doesn't work with 3.0 yet, so I went and downloaded/installed 2.8, but it is still giving me the same thing. It doesn't seem to see it. Funny thing is, "Moving to wxWidgets 3.0" is on the front page of the Compiling Audacity section of the forum, haha. Once I finally get this thing built, I'm going to write a step-by-step how to so my groupmates can simulate it.