Getting Started with Origen
How to Install
Origen can be installed on Linux or Windows, this guide refers to the Linux installation.
If running on windows is of interest then please see this guide instead: How to Install Origen on Windows
Origen is distributed as a Ruby gem, which is the Ruby language’s package manager.
Installation of Origen consists of the following steps:
To install Ruby, your system will need a C compiler and the Make utility. Installation of this will vary depending on your particular Linux distribution, but for example on Ubuntu the required build environment can be installed by running:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
It is also recommend to install a recent version (2.x) of Git, if you don’t know how to do that, google for “how to install Git on <your distribution>“.
Origen requires a minimum Ruby version of 2.1.0, you can install this or the latest version.
If you are working from a personal Linux box (or VM), or if you want to install Ruby for yourself only, we recommend that you install it via rbenv and follow these installation instructions.
This will install Ruby to your home directory and will not require you to have root access.
If you are working from a corporate environment where a central Ruby installation will be used by many users, we recommend that you follow the instructions on the official Ruby installation guide.
Most likely building from source will be the most appropriate choice in this case, especially if dealing with an older Linux distribution, since the version available from your system’s package manager will probably be quite old.
If you have any particular problems installing Ruby, please use this discussion thread so that we can build up a record of common problems and solutions.
All Origen applications will create an lbin directory that contains the origen executable (and others), you should add these directories to your $PATH.
Executing this command will do that for bash:
echo 'export PATH="./lbin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
Once you have Ruby successfully installed, Origen can be installed very easily via:
gem install origen --no-rdoc --no-ri
You can then verify Origen availability by running origen -v
at which point you should see something like this:
Origen: 0.44.0
Congratulations, Origen is now installed!
Note that the version of Origen that is installed to your Ruby installation does not need to be kept up to date with the latest version of Origen. You can now consider your Ruby environment to be frozen for the foreseeable future.
See the section on Understanding Gems for details on why that is.
A common problem with the final step of installing Origen is to run into problems installing a gem called Nokogiri (which is one of Origen’s dependencies).
Generally the more recent your Linux distribution is, the less likely you are to have problems with this.
It is beyond the scope of this document to deal with likely causes and solutions, however if you do run into problems google should yield plenty of hits of similar cases and hopefully with guidelines on how to fix it.
You can also report problems via this Origen forum thread on Nokogiri Installation Issues and we will do our best to provide help, or you can actually just comment below…