Hello Mark,
thanks for you attempt. One of our developers has Gentoo on desktop and
Fred is running there very well. But it is always about dependencies and
maybe some checks are still missing. I will walk through your mail and
comment individual steps.
fred-manager is script that can be used to install fred under local (non
system) user in one of his directories. This has a lot of advantages.
You can run many Fred installations concurrently, you can easily
uninstall it by just deleting and so on. We use this for unit tests, for
performance tests etc.
Mark J Elkins píše v Po 02. 03. 2009 v 19:14 +0200:
  I'm attempting to install FRED onto a Gentoo box.
I'm using fred-manager
 to do the grunt work.
 I've started with a reasonably minimal install box (no X, etc) and so
 far - added:
 emerge -uv omniORB boost libdaemon postgresql bind bind-tools doxygen
 pyorbit tinyerp-server freefont-ttf
 I'm installing 'fred' into "/home/fred' - as user 'fred'.
 Near the top - I get:-
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 [much deleted]
 Generating python stubs from IDL files
 omniidl -Cbuild/stubs -bpython -Wbinline -Wbpackage=pyfred.idlstubs
 /home/fred/root/share/idl/fred/FileManager.idl
 /home/fred/root/share/idl/fred/Mailer.idl
 /home/fred/root/share/idl/fred/TechCheck.idl
 /home/fred/root/share/idl/fred/ZoneGenerator.idl
 omniidl: Could not import back-end 'python'
 omniidl: Maybe you need to use the -p option?
 omniidl: (The error was 'No module named python')
 error: Return status of omniidl is 256 
This is result of installation of fred-pyfred python component. Python
components of fred use omniORBpy (
http://omniorb.sourceforge.net/) corba
python mappings. We should check for this dependency. Gentoo package
name is 'omniorbpy' and you will have to install it.
/home/fred/download/src/fred-doc2pdf-2.0.0/setup.cfg.template has been
 copied to setup.cfg.
 Updating setup configuration file (setup.cfg).
 running install
 ImportError: No module named trml2pdf
 ImportError: No module named rml2pdf
 ImportError: No module named trml2pdf
 Module rml2pdf was found.
 Looking for folders 'freefont', 'truetype', 'freefont-ttf'...
 Found 1 folder(s).
 Found 12 fonts in folder '/usr/share/fonts/freefont-ttf'.
 Found font family 'FreeSans.ttf'
 Configuration file fred-doc2pdf.conf has been updated
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Has anyone installed FRED on Gentoo?
 What am I still missing?
 Python is installed - version 2.5.2
 Is this error a problem? - I'm worried about "No module named python"
Commented above.
  ----------------
 then...
 At the end of my output - I get:-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 'doc/html/tab_b.gif'
 '/home/fred/root/share/doc/fred-mod-eppd/tab_b.gif'
  /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 'doc/html/tab_l.gif'
 '/home/fred/root/share/doc/fred-mod-eppd/tab_l.gif'
  /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 'doc/html/tab_r.gif'
 '/home/fred/root/share/doc/fred-mod-eppd/tab_r.gif'
  /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 'doc/html/tabs.css'
 '/home/fred/root/share/doc/fred-mod-eppd/tabs.css'
 make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/fred/build/fred-mod-eppd'
 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/fred/build/fred-mod-eppd'
 /home/fred/download/src/fred-webadmin-3.1.1/setup.cfg.template has been
 copied to setup.cfg.
 Updating setup configuration file (setup.cfg).
 running install
 ImportError: No module named simplejson
  fred-webadmin needs simplejson module.
 Checking dependencies.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Again - is this the natural end of the compilation?
 What is the "simplejson" module?
 ** Just found an installable package by that name ** 
This is just one of our dependencies. We use simplejson as template
engine for web whois design. The good is that at least installation
stops here. You have to install this package and run installation again.
  Trying to start everything - I get:-
 $ ./fred-manager start
 ERROR: Starting PostgreSQL 
This is strange. Maybe something useful can be found
in /home/fred/root/nofred/pg.log.
  SUCCESS: Starting omniNames...
 SUCCESS: Starting FRED central registry CORBA servers...
 ERROR: Starting Apache...
 ./fred-manager: line 716:
 /home/fred/root/etc/init.d/fred-webadmin-server: No such file or directory
 ./fred-manager: line 11: /home/fred/root/etc/init.d/local_named: No such
 file or directory
 ERROR: Starting local named 
This looks like installation didn't finish. 'start' command expects that
all parts were installed on proper places.
  cannot chdir(/var/spool/cron), bailing out.
 /var/spool/cron: Permission denied
 cannot chdir(/var/spool/cron), bailing out.
 /var/spool/cron: Permission denied
 cannot chdir(/var/spool/cron), bailing out.
 /var/spool/cron: Permission denied
 My concerns here are - why would I even expect a non-root user to be
 able to start PostgreSQL?? - (which was already running) 
I mentioned this at the beginning. Reason is embedding Fred environment
to some scope and it includes running postgresql and apache as local
user. Of course you can install Fred components directly (make
install/python setup.py install) as system wide, but that is not the
case for fred-manager.
  There seems to be an ugly mix between 'system'
jobs and 'user' jobs?
 The same goes for Apache - only system users (or root) should be able to
 start (and stop) system processes.
 Same for the contents of /var/spool/cron.
 Should I actually copy all of "home/fred/root" to my machines "/" ???
No, all what fred-manager does should be able to run as non-root user.
At the and of installation there is function f_name_add_cron() that adds
regular domain generation to cron of local user. Maybe that cron system
on your linux is configured in the way that prohibit users to install
their cron processes and this is result.
  lastly - the suggestion of just adding four packages
(as well as generic
 tools) does seem misleading. 
I don't understand this - which four packages you mean?
  Now the 'install' ends with:-
 -----------------------------------
 Updating setup configuration file (setup.cfg).
 running install
 ImportError: No module named omniORB
  fred-webadmin needs omniORB module.
 Checking dependencies.
 ... and I'm pretty sure omniORB 4.0.5 is installed. 
Python has omniORB module in python language mappings - omniorbpy, the
same as for pyfred.
Hope, that this will help
I'm looking forward your report.
Regards,
Jaromir