rack-plugin-toolchain not working on fresh Ubuntu 16.04 install

Development
1

I’ve installed the recommended version of Ubuntu for the toolchain (16.04.7), using VirtualBox. I’ve cloned the latest rack plugin toolchain from GitHub and followed the instructions up to “sudo make dep-ubuntu”, which then fails with the following message:

E: Unable to locate package xxd

Previously I’ve used later versions of Ubuntu without any issues.

Is anybody else using Ubuntu version 16.04?

2

Hopefully it won’t be an issue that I’ve removed it from the makefile. I’m currently building the rest of the toolchain - so I guess we shall see when I get back to it in the next few hours.

3

The 16.04 requirement is for the toolchain linux build environment itself, not for the system that hosts the toolchain. For the host system, you should use a current Ubuntu distro. The toolchain documentation, for example, is listing the use of 20.04 in the Docker container. 16.04 is very old and might have issues building all the cross-compile tools necessary for the toolchain.

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4

Yeah - it definitely does. I’ve encountered my second error already (due to an old version of cmake).

I thought that I had seen other users on the forum having issues with newer versions of Ubuntu, and an email from Andrew suggested setting up 16.04 in a VM - but perhaps I’ve misunderstood this.

I’m going to give up on 16.04 for now, and revert back to the last VM I set up.

5

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I think you are confusing the Linux plugin build environment and the toolchain build environment. In order to build plugins for Linux, it is recommended to use Ubuntu 16.04. The reason is that it is currently the oldest common denominator for library linkage support. The toolchain build environment is a distro used to build the toolchain (not the plugins) and requires modern build tools.

So to sum it up:

  • If you use VCV on a specific OS and version and build some plugins by yourself for your own personal use on that same system, then build it on that specific system using the native tools that system offers as you’ll get the most stable version.

  • If you redistribute Linux plugin binaries, use Ubuntu 16.04 to build them (or use the toolchain to do the same)

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6

some plugins that are not built with 16.04 and have issues include Autodafe and the vcv fundamental recorder.