Building Xnee 3.06 on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04

Recently, I wanted to use Xnee (http://www.sandklef.com/xnee/) to automate some GUI application actions on an Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 installation, but I found that the version of Xnee available from the Lucid repositories still has some problems. Specifically, this older Xnee version, 3.02-2ubuntu2, still contains workarounds for some previously existing Xorg RECORD extension problems which have themselves now been fixed in Lucid. The outcome of this mismatch is that recording fails with any of cnee, gnee or pnee. This is resolved in the next release of Ubuntu, 10.10 "Maverick", which includes Xnee 3.06, but I preferred not to upgrade the entire system to a pre-release state just to get this one application working.



Therefore, desiring to build the latest Xnee release from source and resolve the recording problem, I used a trial and error process involving the output of the configure script, along with a good deal of web searching, to come up with a list of required packages to support building Xnee 3.06 from the GNU FTP tarball. On a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 installation, patched up to date but otherwise untouched, the build dependencies can be obtained as such (approximately 100MB in total):

    sudo aptitude install build-essential libxtst-dev libpanel-applet2-dev autoconf automake libtool libgnomeui-dev 

If building package documentation is desired:

    sudo aptitude install dia texi2html texinfo texlive-font-utils texlive-latex-base texlive-generic-recommended 

Now we can get the latest tarball from the GNU FTP site and install it. Include the --disable-doc flag (recommended) if you don't want to spend the time building the package documentation:

    cd ~/
    wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/xnee/xnee-3.06.tar.gz    
    tar xzvf xnee-3.06.tar.gz
    cd xnee-3.06
    ./configure [--disable-doc]
    make
    sudo make install

I found that gnee, the graphical interface for Xnee, would launch and seemed usable enough (though a bit unstable when poked the wrong way) but I wanted to start by learning the basics of its command line interface, and so I haven't messed around with 3.06's gnee quite as much yet. Here are a few working examples using cnee, the Xnee CLI tool:

Recording both mouse and keyboard, storing mouse starting position, using F12 for the "stop recording" key, a countdown timer of 10 to begin and a maximum number of 1000 events to record, storing the results to a new file cnee_test.xnl:

    cnee --record --mouse --keyboard -o cnee_test.xnl --store-mouse-position --stop-key F12 --time 10 --events-to-record 1000 &

Playback of mouse and keyboard events, recalling window position from the recording, with a countdown of 10 seconds to begin playback:

    cnee --replay --mouse --keyboard -f cnee_test.xnl --recall-window-position --time 10

Notes:
1) Recording segfaults after the starting timer completes if F5 is the stop key... I haven't experimented further to see exactly which keys cause this.