Adopting Erlang – Build Instructions for Linux (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed)

[stevenswart]

5th of December 2022

If these instructions save anyone else out there from going down the rabbit hole I went down in trying to build the Adopting Erlang eBooks from source, I will gladly provide them!

The first thing you should know is that the instructions for the Emacs build process are correct – see the README.md file here:

[](https://github.com/adoptingerlang/adoptingerlang

I didn’t get as far as generating the Hugo website, such was not my interest or need, but I assume that will work.

For those who are unfamiliar with Emacs, (I myself am more of a Vim guy), you might find these instructions helpful:

[](https://kb.iu.edu/d/acqm

However, on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, the instructions for the LaTeX build simply do not work at all! I managed to kludge it by fiddling around with the command line arguments, but the resulting PDF was not satisfactory, in that the Table of Contents and internal references were not working properly. Also, I could not create EPUB or MOBI versions of the book at all!

OpenSUSE comes with a barebones installation of LaTeX; however, the texlive dependencies you will need are not installed by default. You will need to install various other dependencies as well.

The first step is to install these:

> sudo zypper in texlive-collection-fontsextra texlive-collection-latexextra texlive-scheme-tetex texlive-cyrillic texlive-pmboxdraw texlive-fncychap texlive-lwa tidy rubber calibre emacs

Expect this step to take several hours, depending on the speed of your network and computer. The texlive dependencies are big!

Then run the Emacs project Tex file build procedure. (First link above.)

Then, to build the PDF:

> pdflatex --shell-escape adoptingerlang.tex

Run this command several times until you stop getting warnings to run it again. (Note that I got warnings about missing includes which I was unable to resolve, however, this does not seem to have materially affected the end result.)

Or, to build the PDF in one step:

> rubber --shell-escape --pdf adoptingerlang

Build the EPUB:

> tex4ebook -s -f epub3 adoptingerlang.tex

Build the MOBI:

> tex4ebook -s -f mobi adoptingerlang.tex

Viola, you’re done! QED!

Adopting.Erlang–Build.Instructions.Linux.pdf

A PDF version of these instructions is attached.