|  |  |  | GTK+ Reference Manual |  | 
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| Compiling the GTK+ librariesCompiling the GTK+ Libraries — How to compile GTK+ itself | 
This chapter covers building and installing GTK+ on UNIX and UNIX-like systems such as Linux. Compiling GTK+ on Microsoft Windows is different in detail and somewhat more difficult to get going since the necessary tools aren't included with the operating system.
Before we get into the details of how to compile GTK+, we should mention that in many cases, binary packages of GTK+ prebuilt for your operating system will be available, either from your operating system vendor or from independent sources. If such a set of packages is available, installing it will get you programming wih GTK+ much faster than building it yourself. In fact, you may well already have GTK+ installed on your system already.
On UNIX-like systems GTK+ uses the standard GNU build system, using autoconf for package configuration and resolving portability issues, automake for building makefiles that comply with the GNU Coding Standards, and libtool for building shared libraries on multiple platforms.
      If you are building GTK+ from the distributed source packages,
      then won't need these tools installed; the necessary pieces
      of the tools are already included in the source packages. But
      it's useful to know a bit about how packages that use these
      tools work. A source package is distributed as a
      tar.gz file which you unpack into a 
      directory full of the source files as follows:
    
      tar xvfz gtk+-2.0.0.tar.gz
    
      In the toplevel of the directory that is created, there will be
      a shell script called configure which
      you then run to take the template makefiles called
      Makefile.in in the package and create
      makefiles customized for your operating system. The configure
      script can be passed various command line arguments to determine how
      the package is built and installed. The most commonly useful
      argument is the --prefix argument which
      determines where the package is installed. To install a package
      in /opt/gtk you would run configure as:
    
      ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk
    
      A full list of options can be found by running
      configure with the
      --help argument. In general, the defaults are
      right and should be trusted. After you've run
      configure, you then run the
      make command to build the package and install
      it.
    
      make
      make install
    
      If you don't have permission to write to the directory you are
      installing in, you may have to change to root temporarily before
      running make install. Also, if you are
      installing in a system directory, on some systems (such as
      Linux), you will need to run ldconfig after
      make install so that the newly installed
      libraries will be found.
    
      Several environment variables are useful to pass to set before
      running configure. CPPFLAGS contains options to
      pass to the C compiler, and is used to tell the compiler where
      to look for include files. The LDFLAGS variable
      is used in a similar fashion for the linker. Finally the
      PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable contains
      a search path that pkg-config (see below)
      uses when looking for for file describing how to compile
      programs using different libraries. If you were installing GTK+
      and it's dependencies into /opt/gtk, you 
      might want to set these variables as:
    
      CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/gtk/include"
      LDFLAGS="-L/opt/gtk/lib"
      PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/gtk/lib/pkgconfig"
      export CPPFLAGS LDFLAGS PKG_CONFIG_PATH
    
      You may also need to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH
      environment variable so the systems dynamic linker can find
      the newly installed libraries, and the PATH
      environment program so that utility binaries installed by
      the various libraries will be found.
    
      LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/gtk/lib"
      PATH="/opt/gtk/bin:$PATH"
      export LD_LIBRARY_PATH PATH
    
Before you can compile the GTK+ widget toolkit, you need to have various other tools and libraries installed on your system. The two tools needed during the build process (as differentiated from the tools used in when creating GTK+ mentioned above such as autoconf) are pkg-config and GNU make.
	  pkg-config
	  is a tool for tracking the compilation flags needed for
	  libraries that are used by the GTK+ libraries. (For each
	  library, a small .pc text file is installed 
          in a standard location that contains the compilation flags 
          needed for that library along with version number information.)  
          The version of pkg-config needed to build 
          GTK+ is mirrored in the dependencies directory
	  on the GTK+ FTP
	  site.
	
The GTK+ makefiles will mostly work with different versions of make, however, there tends to be a few incompatibilities, so the GTK+ team recommends installing GNU make if you don't already have it on your system and using it. (It may be called gmake rather than make.)
Three of the libraries that GTK+ depends on are maintained by by the GTK+ team: GLib, Pango, and ATK. Other libraries are maintained separately.
The GLib library provides core non-graphical functionality such as high level data types, Unicode manipulation, and an object and type system to C programs. It is available from the GTK+ FTP site.
Pango is a library for internationalized text handling. It is available from the GTK+ FTP site..
ATK is the Accessibility Toolkit. It provides a set of generic interfaces allowing accessibility technologies such as screen readers to interact with a graphical user interface. It is available from the GTK+ FTP site.
	  The GNU
	  libiconv library is needed to build GLib if your
	  system doesn't have the iconv()
	  function for doing conversion between character
	  encodings. Most modern systems should have
	  iconv().
	
	  The libintl library from the GNU gettext
	  package is needed if your system doesn't have the
	  gettext() functionality for handling
	  message translation databases.
	
	  The JPEG,
	  PNG, and
	  TIFF image 
          loading libraries are needed to compile GTK+. You probably 
          already have these libraries installed, but if not, the 
          versions you need are available in the 
           dependencies directory on the the
	  GTK+
	    FTP site.. (Before installing these libraries
	  from source, you should check if your operating system
	  vendor has prebuilt packages of these libraries that you
	  don't have installed.)
	
The libraries from the X window system are needed to build Pango and GTK+. You should already have these installed on your system, but it's possible that you'll need to install the development environment for these libraries that your operating system vendor provides.
The fontconfig library provides Pango with a standard way of locating fonts and matching them against font names. The Xft2 library, distributed with fontconfig, provides support for scalable and antialiased fonts on X. Pango includes two backends that work on top of fontconfig: an Xft2 backend and a backend that uses fontconfig and the underlying FreeType library directly. Neither backend is mandatory, but the Xft2 backend is the preferred backend for X and the FreeType backend is needed by many applications.
First make sure that you have the necessary external dependencies installed: pkg-config, GNU make, the JPEG, PNG, and TIFF libraries, FreeType, and, if necessary, libiconv and libintl. To get detailed information about building these packages, see the documentation provided with the individual packages. On a Linux system, it's quite likely you'll have all of these installed already except for pkg-config.
      Then build and install the GTK+ libraries in the order:
      GLib, Pango, ATK, then GTK+. For each library, follow the
      steps of configure, make,
      make install mentioned above. If you're
      lucky, this will all go smoothly, and you'll be ready to
      start compiling your own GTK+
	applications. You can test your GTK+ installation
      by running the gtk-demo program that
      GTK+ installs.
    
      If one of the configure scripts fails or running
      make fails, look closely at the error
      messages printed; these will often provide useful information
      as to what went wrong. When configure
      fails, extra information, such as errors that a test compilation
      ran into, is found in the file config.log.
      Looking at the last couple of hundred lines in this file will
      frequently make clear what went wrong. If all else fails, you
      can ask for help on the gtk-list mailing list.
      See Mailing lists and bug reports(3) for more information.
    
In addition to the normal options, the configure script for the GTK+ library supports a number of additional arguments. (Command line arguments for the other GTK+ libraries are described in the documentation distributed with the those libraries.)
configure  [[--disable-modules] |  [--enable-modules]] [[--with-included-loaders==LOADER1,LOADER2,...]] [[--enable-debug=[no|minimum|yes]]] [[--disable-visibility] |  [--enable-visibility]] [[--disable-shm] |  [--enable-shm]] [[--disable-xim] |  [--enable-xim]] [[--disable-xim-inst] |  [--enable-xim-inst]] [[--disable-xkb] |  [--enable-xkb]] [[--disable-gtk-doc] |  [--enable-gtk-doc]] [[--with-xinput=[no|yes]]] [[--with-gdktarget=[x11|linux-fb|win32]]] [[--disable-shadowfb] |  [--enable-shadowfb]]
--disable-modules and
	  --enable-modules. 
	  Normally GTK+ will try to build the GdkPixbuf image file
	  format loaders as little shared libraries that are loaded on
	  demand.  The --disable-modules
	  argument indicates that they should all be built statically
	  into the GTK+ library instead.  This is useful for
	  people who need to produce statically-linked binaries.  If
	  neither --disable-modules nor
	  --enable-modules is specified, then
	  the configure script will try to
	  auto-detect whether shared modules work on your system.
	
--with-included-loaders. 
         This option allows you to specify which image loaders you
         want to include; for example, you might include only the PNG
         loader to create a smaller GdkPixbuf binary.
	
--enable-debug. 
         Turns on various amounts of debugging support. Setting this to 'no' 
	 disables g_assert(), g_return_if_fail(), g_return_val_if_fail() and
         all cast checks between different object types. Setting it to 'minimum'
         disables only cast checks. Setting it to 'yes' enables 
         runtime debugging. 
         The default is 'minimum'.
         Note that 'no' is fast, but dangerous as it tends to destabilize 
         even mostly bug-free software by changing the effect of many bugs 
         from simple warnings into fatal crashes. Thus 
         --enable-debug=no should not 
         be used for stable releases of GTK+.
        
--disable-visibility and
          --enable-visibility. 
          The option --disable-visibility
          turns off the use of ELF visibility attributes for linking
          optimizations. This makes sense while changing GTK+ itself,
          since the way in which GTK+ uses visibility attributes 
          forces a full rebuild of all source files for any header
          modification.
        
--enable-explicit-deps and
          --disable-explicit-deps. 
	  If --enable-explicit-deps is
	  specified then GTK+ will write the full set of libraries
	  that GTK+ depends upon into its .pc files to be used when
	  programs depending on GTK+ are linked. Otherwise, GTK+
	  only will include the GTK+ libraries themselves, and
	  will depend on system library dependency facilities to
	  bring in the other libraries.
	  By default GTK+ will disable explicit dependencies unless
	  it detects that they are needed on the system. (If you
	  specify --enable-static to force
	  building of static libraries, then explicit dependencies
	  will be written since library dependencies don't work
	  for static libraries.) Specifying
	  --enable-explicit-deps or
	  --enable-static can cause
	  compatibility
	  problems when libraries that GTK+ depends upon change
	  their versions, and should be avoided if possible.
        
--disable-shm and
          --enable-shm. 
          These options can be used to control whether GTK+ will use shared 
          memory to communicate with the X server when possible.
          The default is 'yes'.
        
--disable-xim and
          --enable-xim. 
          These options can be used to control whether GTK+ will 
          be compiled with support for XIM. (The X Input Method
	  extension, used for Japanese input.) The default is yes.
        
--disable-xim-inst and
          --enable-xim-inst. 
          These options determine whether GTK+ will use the 
	  XIM instantiate callback. 
          The default is 'yes', unless the host system is Solaris,
	  where XRegisterIMInstantiateCallback()
	  seems to cause a segfault.
        
--disable-xkb and
          --enable-xkb. 
	  By default the configure script will try
	  to auto-detect whether the XKB extension is supported by
          the X libraries GTK+ is linked with.
          These options can be used to explicitly control whether
	  GTK+ will support the XKB extension. 
        
--disable-gtk-doc and
	  --enable-gtk-doc. 
	  The gtk-doc package is
	  used to generate the reference documentation included
	  with GTK+. By default support for gtk-doc 
	  is disabled because it requires various extra dependencies
	  to be installed. If you have
	  gtk-doc installed and
	  are modifying GTK+, you may want to enable
	  gtk-doc support by passing
	  in --enable-gtk-doc. If not
	  enabled, pre-generated HTML files distributed with GTK+
	  will be installed.
	
--with-xinput. 
	  Controls whether GTK+ is built with support for the XInput
	  extension. The XInput extension provides an interface
	  to extended input devices such as graphics tablets.
	  When this support is compiled in, specially written
	  GTK+ programs can get access to subpixel positions,
	  multiple simultaneous input devices, and extra "axes"
	  provided by the device such as pressure and tilt
	  information. This is only known to work well on XFree86
	  systems, though other systems do have this extension.
        
--with-gdktarget. 
          Toggles between the supported backends for GDK. 
          The default is x11, unless the platform is Windows, in which
	  case the default is win32.
	
--disable-shadowfb and
	  --enable-shadowfb. 
         Toggles shadow framebuffer support for the linux-fb target, 
         if selected.
	
| << Part I. GTK+ Overview | Compiling GTK+ Applications >> |