please expand quick start to summarize initial installation

[archenemies]

Hello! I was just looking at your quick start guide/tutorial. I haven't actually tried the steps, but I noticed that your output of ino build, the first step, contains the line:

Searching for Board description file (boards.txt) ... /usr/local/share/arduino/hardware/arduino/boards.txt

This seems to imply that I should have this boards.txt file somewhere on my system. Please update quick start with a few sentences explaining what other packages have to be installed before users can begin the tutorial. I think this will make it more accessible to beginners. Thank you!

[nophead]

If you look at the requirements section of the README you will see that you need the Arduino IDE installed. That is where the boards.txt comes from.

[archenemies]

Thanks! I think it would be good to put that information in the tutorial. Just a few lines or a link about installing the IDE and whatever configuration is needed beyond that. From what I have read, your project would provide a more useful interface than the IDE for a user like myself, so I'm not necessarily interested in learning about the IDE beyond what is needed to use ino. Does that make sense?

Just for context, I have untarred something which calls itself the Arduino IDE, and I ran ./install.sh, but the only location for boards.txt on my filesystem is in the tarball directory, nothing in /usr/share/... So that's how little I know about what "Requirements: Arduino IDE" means.

Thank you!

[nophead]

All I needed to do was

sudo apt-get install arduino

[archenemies]

OK, it's not in the official repos of my distribution.

But if you did apt-get install arduino, it would be useful to put that line in the tutorial as it tells me a bit where to look. Thanks.

[archenemies]

How's this:

--- README.rst  2016-05-19 16:29:36.809358789 -0700
+++ README.rst.1    2016-05-19 16:30:28.900644240 -0700
@@ -57,7 +57,7 @@
 ============

 * Python 2.6+
-* Arduino IDE distribution
+* Arduino IDE distribution (``apt-get install arduino``)
 * ``picocom`` for serial communication

 Limitations

[archenemies]

Or this:

--- quickstart.rst.old  2016-05-20 11:28:32.698244860 -0700
+++ quickstart.rst  2016-05-20 11:43:11.259839158 -0700
@@ -4,6 +4,21 @@

 Learn how to work with ino in few minutes.

+
+Prerequisites
+-------------
+
+Make sure you have first installed Ino and its prerequisites as
+described in the `README <http://inotool.org/>`_.
+
+Note that the Arduino IDE should be installed from your distribution's
+packaging system (e.g. ``apt-get install arduino``), so that
+``boards.txt`` can be found in a standard location under
+``/usr/share/`` or ``/usr/local/share/``. The `Arduino website
+binaries <https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software>`_ provide an
+"in-place" installation, which won't work for us.
+
+
 Creating a project
 ------------------

[shaleh]

Looks good. Commit it :+1:

[archenemies]

Hey thanks. By the way is Inotool still being used? This URL

http://playground.arduino.cc/Learning/CommandLine

says "The popular command line builder, Ino (available at http://inotool.org/) has not seen active development in some time and no longer works with newer versions of the Arduino IDE". If that is true, I think it should be in the Quick Start Guide as well...

[shaleh]

Yeah, it looks like ino is dead. https://github.com/scottdarch/Arturo is meant to be the continued fork. It ships a command called 'ano'.

[archenemies]

Did the maintainer just die or something? How odd...