install.txt

wxWidgets for GTK+ installation
-------------------------------

IMPORTANT NOTE:

  If you experience problems installing, please re-read these
  instructions and other related files (todo.txt, bugs.txt and
  osname.txt for your platform if it exists) carefully before
  mailing wxwin-users or the author. Preferably, try to fix the
  problem first and then send a patch to the author.

  When sending bug reports tell us what version of wxWidgets you are
  using (including the beta) and what compiler on what system. One
  example: wxGTK 3.0.0, GCC 4.8.1, Fedora 19

* The simplest case
-------------------

If you compile wxWidgets on Linux for the first time and don't like to read
install instructions just do (in the base dir):

> mkdir buildgtk
> cd buildgtk
> ../configure --with-gtk
> make
> su <type root password>
> make install
> ldconfig
[if you get "ldconfig: command not found", try using "/sbin/ldconfig"]

If you don't do the 'make install' part, you can still use the libraries from
the buildgtk directory, but they may not be available to other users.

If you want to remove wxWidgets on Unix you can do this:

> su <type root password>
> make uninstall
> ldconfig

Note that by default, GTK+ 2.x is used. GTK+ 3 can be specified
with --with-gtk=3.

* The expert case
-----------------

If you want to do some more serious cross-platform programming with wxWidgets,
such as for GTK+ and Motif, you can now build two complete libraries and use
them concurrently. To do this, create a separate directory for each build
of wxWidgets - you may also want to create different versions of wxWidgets
and test them concurrently. Most typically, this would be a version configured
with --enable-debug and one without.

For building three versions (one GTK+, one Motif and a debug version of the GTK
source) you'd do this:

mkdir buildmotif
cd buildmotif
../configure --with-motif
make
cd ..

mkdir buildgtk
cd buildgtk
../configure --with-gtk
make
cd ..

mkdir buildgtkd
cd buildgtkd
../configure --with-gtk --enable-debug
make
cd ..

Note that you can install all those libraries concurrently, you just need to
pass the appropriate flags when using them.

* The simplest errors
---------------------

For any configure errors: please look at config.log file which was generated
during configure run, it usually contains some useful information.

configure reports, that you don't have GTK+ 1.2/2.0/3.0 installed although you
are very sure you have. Well, you have installed it, but you also have another
version of the GTK+ installed, which you may need to remove including other
versions of glib (and its headers). Or maybe you installed it in a non-default
location and configure can't find it there, so please check that your PATH
variable includes the path to the correct gtk-config/pkg-config. Also check
that your LD_LIBRARY_PATH or equivalent variable contains the path to GTK+
libraries if they were installed in a non-default location.

You get errors from make: please use GNU make instead of the native make
program. Currently wxWidgets can be built only with GNU make, BSD make and
Solaris make. Other versions might work or not (any which don't have VPATH
support definitely won't).

You get errors during compilation: The reason is that you probably have a
broken compiler.  GCC 2.8 and earlier versions and egcs are likely to cause
problems due to incomplete support for C++ and optimisation bugs.  Best to use
GCC 2.95 or later.

You get immediate segfault when starting any sample or application: This is
either due to having compiled the library with different flags or options than
your program - typically you might have the __WXDEBUG__ option set for the
library but not for your program - or due to using a compiler with optimisation
bugs.

* The simplest program
----------------------

Now create your super-application myfoo.cpp and compile anywhere with

g++ myfoo.cpp `wx-config --libs --cxxflags` -o myfoo

* GUI libraries
---------------

wxWidgets/GTK+ requires the GTK+ library to be installed on your system. It has
to be a stable version, preferably GTK+ 2.x.y, where x is an even number.
GTK+ version 1.2 is highly discouraged, but if you decide to still use it,
please use version 1.2.10 (at least 1.2.3 is required, 1.2.7 is strongly recommended).

You can get the newest version of the GTK+ from the GTK+ homepage at:

  http://www.gtk.org

We also mirror GTK+ at my ftp site. You'll find information about downloading
at my homepage.

* Additional libraries
----------------------

wxWidgets/Gtk requires a thread library and X libraries known to work with
threads.  This is the case on all commercial Unix-Variants and all
Linux-Versions that are based on glibc 2 except RedHat 5.0 which is broken in
many aspects. As of writing this, virtually all Linux distributions have
correct glibc 2 support.

You can disable thread support by running

./configure --disable-threads
make
su <type root password>
make install
ldconfig
exit

* Building wxGTK on Cygwin
--------------------------

The normal build instructions should work fine on Cygwin. The one difference
with Cygwin is that when using the "--enable-shared" configure option (which
is the default) the API is exported explicitly using __declspec(dllexport)
rather than all global symbols being available.

This shouldn't make a difference using the library and should be a little
more efficient. However if an export attribute has been missed somewhere you
will see linking errors. If this happens then you can work around the
problem by setting LDFLAGS=-Wl,--export-all-symbols. Please also let us know
about it on the wx-dev mailing list.

* Create your configuration
---------------------------

Usage:
    ./configure options

If you want to use system's C and C++ compiler,
set environment variables CC and CXX as

    % setenv CC cc
    % setenv CXX CC
    % ./configure [options]

to see all the options please use:

    ./configure --help

It is recommended to build wxWidgets in another directory (maybe a
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation) as this allows you to
have multiple configurations (for example, debug and release or GTK
and Motif) simultaneously.


* General options
-----------------

Given below are the commands to change the default behaviour,
i.e. if it says "--disable-threads" it means that threads
are enabled by default.

Normally, you won't have to choose a toolkit, because when
you download wxGTK, it will default to --with-gtk etc. But
if you use the git repository you have to choose a toolkit.
You must do this by running configure with either of:

    --with-gtk=2            Use the GTK+ 2.0. Default.
    --with-gtk=3            Use the GTK+ 3.
    --with-gtk=1            Use the GTK+ 1.2.

The following options handle the kind of library you want to build.

    --disable-threads       Compile without thread support.

    --disable-shared        Do not create shared libraries, but
                            build static libraries instead.

    --enable-monolithic     Build wxWidgets as single library instead
                            of as several smaller libraries (which is
                            the default since wxWidgets 2.5.0).

    --disable-optimise      Do not optimise the code. Can
                            sometimes be useful for debugging
                            and is required on some architectures
                            such as Sun with gcc 2.8.X which
                            would otherwise produce segvs.

    --enable-unicode        Enable Unicode support.

    --enable-profile        Add profiling info to the object
                            files. Currently broken, I think.

    --enable-no_rtti        Enable compilation without creation of
                            C++ RTTI information in object files.
                            This will speed-up compilation and reduce
                            binary size.

    --enable-no_exceptions  Enable compilation without creation of
                            C++ exception information in object files.
                            This will speed-up compilation and reduce
                            binary size. Also fewer crashes during the
                            actual compilation...

    --enable-no_deps        Enable compilation without creation of
                            dependency information.

    --enable-permissive     Enable compilation without checking for strict
                            ANSI conformance.  Useful to prevent the build
                            dying with errors as soon as you compile with
                            Solaris' ANSI-defying headers.

    --enable-mem_tracing    Add built-in memory tracing.

    --enable-dmalloc        Use the dmalloc memory debugger.
                            Read more at www.letters.com/dmalloc/

    --enable-debug_info     Add debug info to object files and
                            executables for use with debuggers
                            such as gdb (or its many frontends).

    --enable-debug_flag     Define __DEBUG__ and __WXDEBUG__ when
                            compiling. This enable wxWidgets' very
                            useful internal debugging tricks (such
                            as automatically reporting illegal calls)
                            to work. Note that program and library
                            must be compiled with the same debug
                            options.

    --enable-debug          Same as --enable-debug_info and
                            --enable-debug_flag together. Unless you have
                            some very specific needs, you should use this
                            option instead of --enable-debug_info/flag ones
                            separately.

* Feature Options
-----------------

When producing an executable that is linked statically with wxGTK
you'll be surprised at its immense size. This can sometimes be
drastically reduced by removing features from wxWidgets that
are not used in your program. The most relevant such features
are

    --without-libpng        Disables PNG image format code.

    --without-libjpeg       Disables JPEG image format code.

    --without-libtiff       Disables TIFF image format code.

    --without-expat         Disable XML classes based on Expat parser.

    --disable-pnm           Disables PNM image format code.

    --disable-gif           Disables GIF image format code.

    --disable-pcx           Disables PCX image format code.

    --disable-iff           Disables IFF image format code.

    --disable-resources     Disables the use of *.wxr type resources.

    --disable-threads       Disables threads. Will also disable sockets.

    --disable-sockets       Disables sockets.

    --disable-dnd           Disables Drag'n'Drop.

    --disable-clipboard     Disables Clipboard.

    --disable-serial        Disables object instance serialisation.

    --disable-streams       Disables the wxStream classes.

    --disable-file          Disables the wxFile class.

    --disable-textfile      Disables the wxTextFile class.

    --disable-intl          Disables the internationalisation.

    --disable-validators    Disables validators.

    --disable-accel         Disables accelerators support.

Apart from disabling certain features you can very often "strip"
the program of its debugging information resulting in a significant
reduction in size.

Please see the output of "./configure --help" for comprehensive list
of all configurable options.


* Compiling
-----------

The following must be done in the base directory (e.g. ~/wxGTK
or ~/wxWin or whatever)

Now the makefiles are created (by configure) and you can compile
the library by typing:

    make

make yourself some coffee, as it will take some time. On an old
386SX possibly two weeks. During compilation, you'll get a few
warning messages depending in your compiler.

If you want to be more selective, you can change into a specific
directory and type "make" there.

Then you may install the library and its header files under
/usr/local/include/wx and /usr/local/lib respectively. You
have to log in as root (i.e. run "su" and enter the root
password) and type

        make install

You can remove any traces of wxWidgets by typing

        make uninstall

If you want to save disk space by removing unnecessary
object-files:

make clean

in the various directories will do the work for you.

* Creating a new Project
--------------------------

1) The first way uses the installed libraries and header files
automatically using wx-config

g++ myfoo.cpp `wx-config --cxxflags --libs` -o myfoo

Using this way, a make file for the minimal sample would look
like this

CXX = g++

minimal: minimal.o
	$(CXX) -o minimal minimal.o `wx-config --libs`

minimal.o: minimal.cpp
	$(CXX) `wx-config --cxxflags` -c minimal.cpp -o minimal.o

clean:
	rm -f *.o minimal

If your application uses only some of wxWidgets libraries, you can
specify required libraries when running wx-config. For example,
`wx-config --libs=html,core` will only output link command to link
with libraries required by core GUI classes and wxHTML classes. See
the manual for more information on the libraries.

2) The other way creates a project within the source code
directories of wxWidgets. For this endeavour, you'll need
GNU autoconf version 2.14 and add an entry to your Makefile.in
to the bottom of the configure.in script and run autoconf
and configure before you can type make.

----------------------

In the hope that it will be useful,

        Robert Roebling