wxWidgets/docs/x11/install.md

wxWidgets for X11 installation

[TOC]

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: wxX11 2.8.0, gcc 2.95.4, Redhat 6.2

First steps

• Download wxX11-x.y.z.tgz, where x.y.z is the version number. Download documentation in a preferred format, such as wxWidgets-HTML.zip or wxWidgets-PDF.zip.

• Make a directory such as ~/wx and unarchive the files into this directory.

• It is recommended that you install bison and flex; using yacc and lex may require tweaking of the makefiles. You also need libXpm if you want to have XPM support in wxWidgets (recommended).

• You can now use configure to build wxWidgets and the samples.

  Using configure is the recommended way to build the library. If it doesn't work for you for whatever reason, please report it (together with detailed information about your platform and the (relevant part of) contents of config.log file).

Compiling using configure

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):

> ./configure --with-x11
> make
> su <type root password>
> make install
> ldconfig
> exit

Afterwards you can continue with

> make
> su <type root password>
> make install
> ldconfig
> exit

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

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

The expert case

If you want to do some more serious cross-platform programming with wxWidgets, such as for GTK and X11, you can now build two complete libraries and use them concurrently. For this end, you have to create a 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_flag and one without. Note, that only one build can currently be installed, so you'd have to use local version of the library for that purpose.

For building three versions (one GTK, one X11 and a debug version of the GTK source) you'd do this:

md buildx11
cd buildx11
../configure --with-x11
make
cd ..

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

md buildgtkd
cd buildgtkd
../configure --with-gtk --enable-debug_flag
make
cd ..

The simplest errors

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

General

The Unix variants of wxWidgets use GNU configure. If you have problems with your make use GNU make instead.

If you have general problems with installation, see the wxWidgets website at

https://www.wxwidgets.org/

for newest information. If you still don't have any success, please send a bug report to one of our mailing lists (see my homepage) INCLUDING A DESCRIPTION OF YOUR SYSTEM AND YOUR PROBLEM, SUCH AS YOUR VERSION OF X, WHAT DISTRIBUTION YOU USE AND WHAT ERROR WAS REPORTED. I know this has no effect, but I tried...

GUI libraries

wxWidgets/X11 requires the X11 library to be installed on your system.

Additional libraries

wxWidgets/X11 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 wxX11 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 CXX and CC as

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

to see all the options please use:

./configure --help

The basic philosophy is that if you want to use different configurations, like a debug and a release version, or use the same source tree on different systems, you have only to change the environment variable OSTYPE. (Sadly this variable is not set by default on some systems in some shells - on SGI's for example). So you will have to set it there. This variable HAS to be set before starting configure, so that it knows which system it tries to configure for.

Configure will complain if the system variable OSTYPE has not been defined. And Make in some circumstances as well...

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.

You have to add --with-x11 on platforms, where X11 is not the default (on Linux, configure will default to GTK).

--with-x11              Use X11.

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

--disable-threads       Compile without thread support. Threads
                        support is also required for the
			socket code to work.

--disable-shared        Do not create shared libraries.

--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-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-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.

Feature Options

Many of the configure options have been thoroughly tested in wxWidgets snapshot 6, but not yet all (ODBC not).

When producing an executable that is linked statically with wxX11 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-expat         Disable XML classes based on Expat parser.

    --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 accel.

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. ~/wxX11 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 --libs` `wx-config --cxxflags` -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
   

   This is certain to become the standard way unless we decide to stick to tmake.

   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.

Further notes by Julian Smart

• You may find the following script useful for compiling wxX11, especially if installing from zips (which don't preserve file permissions). Make this script executable with the command chmod a+x makewxx11.

    # makewxx11
    # Sets permissions (in case we extracted wxX11 from zip files)
    # and makes wxX11.
    # Call from top-level wxWidgets directory.
    # Note that this uses standard (but commonly-used) configure options;
    # if you're feeling brave, you may wish to compile with threads:
    # if they're not supported by the target platform, they will be disabled
    # anyhow
    # -- Julian Smart
    chmod a+x configure config.sub config.guess
    ./configure --with-x11 --with-shared --with-debug_flag --with-debug_info --enable-debug --without-threads --without-sockets --without-odbc
    make
  

  This script will build wxX11 using shared libraries. If you want to build a static wxWidgets library, use --disable-shared.

Troubleshooting

• Solaris compilation with gcc: if the compiler has problems with the variable argument functions, try putting the gcc fixinclude file paths early in the include path.

• If you operator-related compile errors or strange memory problems (for example in deletion of string arrays), set wxUSE_GLOBAL_MEMORY_OPERATORS and wxUSE_MEMORY_TRACING to 0 in setup.h, and recompile.

• If you get an internal compiler error in gcc, turn off optimisations.

• Some compilers, such as Sun C++, may give a lot of warnings about virtual functions being hidden. Please ignore these, it's correct C++ syntax. If you find any incorrect instances, though, such as a missing 'const' in an overridden function, please let us know.

Other Notes

• Debugging mode is switched on by default in the makefiles, but using configure will create a release build of the library by default: it's recommended to use --with-debug_info and --with-debug_flag configure switches while developing your application. To compile in non-debug mode, remove the -D__WXDEBUG__ switch in make.env (or if using the configure system, change --with-debug_flag to --without-debug_flag and --with-debug_info to --without-debug_info in the makewxx11 script).