Installing eBUS SDK 7 on Alma9.7 – JAI support

As Alma 9.7 is binary compatible with RHEL 9.7, we should be able to install eBUS 7 on it.
The goal of this guide is to open a camera with the eBUS player on Alma9.7

Prerequisite

In order to get this to work, we need the following:

eBUS_SDK_JAI_RHEL-CentOS-x86_64-7.0.1-7536.rpm
Latest DVD version of Alma 9.x
Rufus
USB with at least 8 GB.

Installing Alma9

To install Alma9, you need to create a bootable USB drive using Rufus.
It is fairly straightforward with Rufus;

Choose your empty USB device
Choose "AlmaLinux-9.7-x86_64-dvd.iso" or the latest version as the boot selection.
Click Start
- Follow Rufus recommended option if any options appear after clicking Start.

Now it's time to install Alma9, You should follow the steps provided by the Alma team:

https://wiki.almalinux.org/documentation/installation-guide.html#installation

However, in software selection, I recommend choosing "Workstation" as we need a desktop system to run eBUS player. While here, you can add additional software that might be useful:

Development Tools
.NET development
Graphical administration tools
System Tools

After installing Alma9, log in and run the following commands to update:

sudo dnf update

Installing eBUS SDK

First, let's install the needed packages.

sudo yum install -y \
    python3-numpy \
    python3-pip \
    https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm \
    https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/el/rpmfusion-free-release-9.noarch.rpm \
    https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/el/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-9.noarch.rpm
    
sudo yum config-manager --set-enabled crb
sudo yum install -y ffmpeg

sudo dnf install -y \
    chkconfig \ 
    libglvnd-opengl \ 
    mpg123 \ 
    xcb-util-cursor

Now we are ready to install eBUS SDK.

sudo rpm =iv eBUS_SDK_JAI_RHEL-CentOS-x86_64-7.0.1-7536.rpm

Remove firewall:

With the firewall, eBUS Player can be started, but GEV devices are not detected. So lets disable it.

sudo systemctl disable firewalld

log off and log on

sudo systemctl stop firewalld 
sudo systemctl disable firewalld

Optional step to use eBUS DotNet:

dnf install dotnet-sdk-8.0

Optional step to get Python display:

python3 -m pip install --user --upgrade pip 
python3 -m pip install --user 'opencv-python<4' --prefer-binary

Optional step to get MP4 saving option with the eBUSPlayerClassic sample:

sudo yum install ffmpeg-devel

Modify the Makefile in the eBUSPlayerClassic folder and add these lines at the end of the Makefile

LDFLAGS +=  -lswscale \            
            -lavcodec \            
            -lavformat\            
            -lavutil 
            
CPPFLAGS += -D 
__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -D 
PV_ENABLE_MP4 -I /usr/include/ffmpeg

Clean the previous compilation with make clean.

make clean

Recompile eBUSPlayerClassic sample with the make command.

make