See the end of this post for the raw steps that worked for me. The background that lead there comes first.
While working on the course work and projects for the Udacity Frontend Web Developer NanoDegree, I got very tired of the nag screen from Sublime Text.
Sublime text was the suggested text editor to use for anyone that did not have a strong preference for something else. It was used in the video examples, which made using it one less thing to look different while comparing what I was doing, with what the instructor was doing. Once I was through the very basics though, that pop-up regularly interrupting my work flow to ask me to register became annoying.
The alternate editor suggestion was Atom, the hackable text editor created by GitHub. An editor built on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript appealed to me, so I figured to give it a try. There were a few problems along the way, but this documents what actually ended up working, with references to some of the what and why.
###The starting environment A fresh load of the 32bit Fedora 21 Workstation distro spun up as a guest VM in VirtualBox running on Windows 7. Just about the only thing added to that, was the VirtualBox Guest Additions, but that required dkms, so the basic software build tools were installed. VirtualBox has a snapshot feature that makes exploring alternate paths from a common starting state easy. Once the starting configuration is setup, just create a snapshot. At a later time, that snapshot can be restored to try something different from exactly the same conditions. I used that extensively while finding out what worked. By the time I got to the final working sequence, I had created, reverted, and deleted about a dozen snapshots.
LinuxG.net has a an article about how to install Atom on Fedora 20 systems, but it turned out to both include unneeded steps, and to not work. I found A Gist with similar instructions, but the comments pointed to some alternatives and simplifications. That also failed, but a web search using the error message lead to , which said that a newer version of node was needed, as well as the upgrade to npm mentioned in the original installation articles.
During the searches for answers, I had looked at the main NODE.JS web site. Since that was showing a newer version than yum was installing, I figured I could avoid some of the install and upgrade steps from the instructions I started with. I would just add the nodesource repo to yum, and install node.js from there. Still not quite. After that install, software versions seemed to be where Atom needed them to be, but the build failed on another missing build environment requirement. Not being a linux guru, I decided it was time to let the system do some of the work for me. I reverted to the configuration snapshot after the installation of node and npm from the fedora repositories. Then used the instructions from the node.js site to get the updated versions. After a detour to remove some of the software that yum had installed, … it actually worked!
First the local prerequisites. Create a couple of folders to hold the cloned Atom repository, and the installed version after it has been built.
mkdir -p ~/development/repos
sudo mkdir -p /opt/atom
sudo chown user:user /opt/atomMake sure to change “user:user” to your own user and group name or number.
Now for the base software prerequisites.
sudo yum -y install node npm libgnome-keyring-develThat currently installs gyp (which causes a conflict problem), node v0.10.33, and npm v1.3.6.
Upgrade the software environment, and following instructions,
sudo -i
curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup | bash -
yum remove nodejs npm
yum install nodejs
yum remove gyp
exitThe prerequisites for building Atom are now all in place. Just need to get the source, do the build, and install.
cd ~/development/repos/
git clone https://github.com/atom/atom
cd atom
./script/build
script/grunt install --install-dir /opt/atom
sudo ln -s /opt/atom/bin/atom /usr/local/binNow atom is available for the whole system. Although I did not cleanup the ownership of the installed code. The installation folder is still owned by the local user instead of root.