Getting QPID running on Ubuntu

After reading Joshua Kramers article in the November 2009 issue of Linux Journal, I decided to try out AMQP and see how easy it was to set up and get going.

Firstly, the article doesn't mention:

* You need dependencies, namely valgrind, libboost-dev, uuid-dev
* the version of g++ that comes with Ubuntu 9.04 (g++-4.3) doesn't work with qpid-0.5, so you need to change the symlink to point to the older g++4.2 version
* the python tests fail due to an obscure line which goes something like:
if isinstance(sock, socket.SSLType):
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SSLType'
* When trying to install the python modules I had a probem with the setup.py script and ended up commenting out the 'scripts=["amqp-doc"]' argument to the setup method due to the fact that it complained about not being able to find the script.
* Trying to run the 'Listing1.py' code resulted in it not being able to find the AMPQ spec, even after I had set the environment variable $AMPQ_SPEC to point to the correct file. Eventually I just hardcoded the value by editing the '/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/qpid/spec.py' file and setting 'amqp_spec = "/usr/local/share/qpid/specs/amqp.0-10-qpid-errata.xml"' instead of the previous version which was ' amqp_spec = os.environ["AMQP_SPEC"]'

I haven't been able to find anything else on this error, with the exception of other frustrated qpid users.