wxWidgets for GTK installation {#plat_gtk_install} ------------------------------- [TOC] Installation {#gtk_install} ============ The simplest case {#gtk_simple} ------------------- If you compile wxWidgets on Linux for the first time and don't like to read install instructions just do the following in wxWidgets directory: > mkdir buildgtk > cd buildgtk > ../configure --with-gtk > make > su > 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 > make uninstall > ldconfig Note that by default, GTK 3 is used. GTK 2 can be specified with --with-gtk=2. If you use CMake, please see @ref overview_cmake for building wxWidgets using it. Troubleshooting {#gtk_errors_simple} --------------- IMPORTANT NOTE: 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 3.0.5, GCC 9.3.1, Fedora 31. For any configure errors: please look at `config.log` file which was generated during configure run, it usually contains some useful information. If configure reports that you don't have GTK installed, please check that the appropriate _development_ package is available on your system and not just the GTK libraries themselves. You can use `pkg-config --modversion gtk+-3.0` (or `2.0`) to check that this is the case. 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. You get immediate crashes when starting any sample or application: This may be due to having compiled the library with different flags or compiler options than your program or using the headers from a different version of the library that is being used during run-time. If you have multiple versions of wxWidgets installed, please try uninstalling the ones you don't need and rebuilding. The simplest program {#gtk_simple_app} ---------------------- Now create your super-application myfoo.cpp and compile anywhere with g++ myfoo.cpp `wx-config --libs --cxxflags` -o myfoo Building wxGTK on Cygwin {#gtk_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. Configure options {#gtk_options} ----------------- This section documents some of the most important configure options. It is not exhaustive, please refer to `configure --help` for the full list of options. Note that the options documented below are given in the form indicating how to change the default behaviour, i.e. if it says "--disable-optimise" it means that optimizations are enabled by default. All standard configure options are supported, e.g. you can choose `--prefix` to select the directory to install the libraries to. Also note that cross-compiling is fully supported, just specify the `--host` option as usual (please refer to autoconf manual for more information). The following options can be used to specify the kind and number of libraries to build: --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). Options for third party dependencies: wxWidgets may use other libraries present on the current system. For some of these libraries, wxWidgets also provides built-in versions, that can be linked into wx libraries themselves, which can be useful to minimize external dependencies. --disable-sys-libs Don't use system libraries when there is a built-in version included in wxWidgets. Note that other system libraries can, and typically will, still be used if found. --without-libpng Disables PNG image format code. Don't use libpng (although GTK itself still uses it). --without-libjpeg Disables JPEG image format code. Don't use libjpeg. --without-libtiff Disables TIFF image format code. Don't use libtiff. --without-expat Disable XML classes based on Expat parser. Don't use expat library. --without-liblzma Disable LZMA compression support. Don't use liblzma. --without-libcurl Don't use libcurl even if it's available. Disables wxWebRequest. --without-opengl Disable OpenGL integration with wxGLCanvas. Don't use OpenGL or EGL libraries. --disable-glcanvasegl Disable EGL support even if it is available (it would be used if it is, by default). --disable-mediactrl Disable wxMediaCtrl. Don't use GStreamer libraries. --disable-webview Disable wxWebView. Don't use webkit2gtk and its multiple dependencies. Normally, you won't have to choose a toolkit, because configure defaults to wxGTK anyhow. However you need to use this option to explicitly specify the version of GTK to use, e.g.: --with-gtk=3 Use GTK 3. Default. --with-gtk=2 Use GTK 2. --with-gtk=1 Use GTK 1.2. Obsolete. Some other general compilation options: --disable-optimise Do not optimise the code. Can be useful for debugging but shouldn't be used for production builds. --disable-unicode Disable Unicode support. Not recommended. --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. --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. To reduce the final libraries (or executables, when linking statically) size, many wxWidgets features may be disabled. Here is a list of some of them: --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-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. Please remember that the full list of options can be seen in `configure --help` output. Building the libraries {#gtk_compling} ---------------------- After running configure, just run `make` from the same directory. Building can take some time and it's strongly recommended to use `--jobs` option with GNU make, e.g. `make -j8` if you have 8 logical CPU cores. Then you may install the library and its header files under `/usr/local/include/wx` and `/usr/local/lib` respectively. You have to perform the following command as root, using either `su` or `sudo`: make install After installing, you can run `make clean` in the original directory or just remove it entirely if you don't plan to build wxWidgets again in the near future. Note that installing the library is _not_ required and it can also be used from the build directory by simply specifying the full path to `wx-config` script located in it when building your application. Building your project {#gtk_new_project} --------------------- You need to use the compilation flags returned by `wx-config --cxxflags` and linking flags returned by `wx-config --libs`, which may be combined into a single invocation: g++ myfoo.cpp `wx-config --cxxflags --libs` -o myfoo A simple makefile for a program using wxWidgets could be written in the following way (note that if you are copying and pasting this into your makefile, the leading spaces must be replaced by a `TAB` character): ```make program: program.o $(CXX) -o program program.o `wx-config --libs` program.o: program.cpp $(CXX) `wx-config --cxxflags` -c program.cpp -o program.o clean: $(RM) program.o program .PHONY: clean ``` 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.