Figured this may be of help to someone, since the documentation is a bit sparse. Maybe there's a way to submit documentation pull-requests or updates?
Installing on Ubuntu 20.10 gave me a few errors, so here's the process that worked for me and everything went well after:
PlasticSCM includes a GTK-based interface in some versions, which relies on libgnome2.0. However, Ubuntu 20 does not have a way to install libgnome2.0. They must, instead, be installed from an older repository, bionic.
Set up the bionic repos to get libgnome 2.0. Create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/bionic-oldlibs.list file and add into it:
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic main restricted
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic universe
Then update the apt list;
sudo apt-get update
You may receive a No Pub-key error (or something similar). Get the public key signature and add it into the apt-key:
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys $key
The $key value comes from running the command and getting the error
W: GPG error: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic InRelease: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 3B4FE6ACC0B21F32
So in my case this became:
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 3B4FE6ACC0B21F32
Then run the installer:
sudo apt install plasticscm-complete
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
...
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Setting up plasticscm-client-gtk (9.0.16.5201) ...
ln: failed to create symbolic link '/opt/plasticscm5/mono/etc/mono/4.5': No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing package plasticscm-client-gtk (--configure):
installed plasticscm-client-gtk package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure.
No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure.
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of plasticscm-client-complete:
plasticscm-client-complete depends on plasticscm-client-gtk (= 9.0.16.5201); however:
Package plasticscm-client-gtk is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing package plasticscm-client-complete (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of plasticscm-complete:
plasticscm-complete depends on plasticscm-client-complete (= 9.0.16.5201); however:
Package plasticscm-client-complete is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing package plasticscm-complete (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
plasticscm-client-gtk
plasticscm-client-complete
plasticscm-complete
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
The root of the error is the "ln: failed to create symbolic link '/opt/plasticscm5/mono/etc/mono/4.5': No such file or directory".
So let's create the containing folder:
sudo mkdir -p /opt/plasticscm5/mono/etc/mono/
sudo apt install plasticscm-complete
This then should work and install everything. The relevant services will be running on ports 7178, 7179, 8087 and 8088 by default. These are based on the default port definitions in the `/opt/plasticscm5/server/server.conf` and `/opt/plasticscm5/server/network.conf` files.
But how is the service running? Some of the plasticscm documentation refers to /etc/init.d/ but Ubuntu switched over to using systemd based systemctl commands a few versions back. Check the status of the service by
systemctl status plasticscm-server
You may also want to add users from the command line. Some of the documentation refers to the `umtool`, which has now become a parameter of the plasticd application:
plasticd umtool
This should give you the command-line options to proceed
Finally you'll want to restart the plasticd service:
systemctl restart plasticscm-server
Hopefully this helps someone to not have to do the random searches I had to