Installing Code::Blocks from source on Linux

These are instructions on how to build Code::Blocks under Linux. I 've ran and verified this procedure to work under SuSE 9.2 and Fedora Core 3. These instructions should work for all Linux distros, as we 'll be installing from sources.

Prerequisites

In order to sucesfully compile Code::Blocks, the wxWidgets (wxGTK-2.6.1 or later) cross-platform UI library must be installed. In this document, it is not assumed that it is already installed in your system and instructions are given on how to download, build and install it. What is not covered here, is the wxWidgets prerequisites. The most important being GTK2, of course! Let me stress it here, while it's early: GTK2 is required, not GTK1, for Code::Blocks to be operational.

You do not need to Compile wxWidgets if your distribution has wxGTK 2.6 and wxGTK 2.6-dev package available. A quick search for "wxGTK" through your respective package manager should show bring up the needed packages. After you have installed successfully you can moving on the the Installing Code::Blocks portion. If you are using Ubuntu and have installed the wxGTK package, you must also have the dev version as well as the "wx-common" package in order to successfully compile Code::Blocks.

All the instructions below, assume an existing directory named ~/devel. If you 'll be using a different one, adjust the path to match. As a first step create this directory:

mkdir ~/devel

wxGTK installation

Getting wxGTK

Visit the wxWidgets web site. Click the "Download" button at the top of the page. Under wxWidgets 2.6.3 downloads, select wxGTK. Save the file in ~/devel.

wxWidgets project has released two patches for 2.6.3 release. Click the "Patches" in the left side of the page. Download the Patch 2, either in zip or tar.gz format. Save the file in ~/devel

Uncompressing the wxGTK sources

After the download finishes, switch to ~/devel:

cd ~/devel

Now, untar the wxGTK sources:

tar zxf wxGTK-2.6.3.tar.gz

Move the patch to the wxGTK directory

mv wxWidgets-2.6.3-Patch-2.tar.gz wxGTK-2.6.3

or

mv wxWidgets-2.6.3-Patch-2.zip wxGTK-2.6.3

Switch to the wxGTK directory

cd wxGTK-2.6.3

Extract the patch

tar zxf wxWidgets-2.6.3-Patch-2.tar.gz

or

unzip -fo wxWidgets-2.6.3-Patch-2.zip

Remove the patch file

rm wxWidgets-2.6.3-Patch-2.tar.gz

or

rm wxWidgets-2.6.3-Patch-2.zip

wxWidgets build

Here we will create a seperate build directory instead of building from the src directory, so that we can easily rebuild with different options (unicode / ansi, monolithic / many libs, etc).

The documentation says the default is for gtk2 to use unicode and wx > 2.5 to build as a monolithic library. This doesn't appear to be the case, so these flags are passed to configure.

mkdir build_gtk2_shared_monolithic_unicode
cd build_gtk2_shared_monolithic_unicode
../configure --prefix=/opt/wx/2.6 \
       --enable-xrc \
       --enable-monolithic \
       --enable-unicode
make
make -C contrib/src/stc
su
make install
make -C contrib/src/stc install
exit

(Note: it's not necessary to make or install stc if you're compiling cvs HEAD or Code::Blocks newer than RC1)

Add /opt/wx/2.6/bin to the PATH (if you're shell is bash then edit /etc/profile or ~/.bash_profile) (On Suse 10.1 edit /etc/profile.local, it will only be available after a new login). an example PATH

export PATH=/usr/bin:/opt/wx/2.6/bin:$PATH

Note: On Ubuntu Hoary it was necessary to check "Run command as login shell" in the gnome-terminal profile-settings, otherwise the PATH changes are not available in a gnome-terminal window.

add /opt/wx/2.6/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf (nano /etc/ld.so.conf) then run:

ldconfig
source /etc/profile

That's it. Now the linker will look in /opt/wx/2.6/lib for wx libraries and you will have a monolithic shared library unicode build.

To check that things are working, type:

wx-config --prefix

which should give you /opt/wx/2.6

wx-config --libs

which should have at least

-L/opt/wx/2.6/lib -lwx_gtk2-2.6

but can contain other flags as well.

which wx-config

should return /opt/wx/2.6/bin/wx-config

Code::Blocks installation

Downloading Code::Blocks

You can get Code::Blocks source code in one of two ways:

• Download the latest source package, or
• Get the latest sources from the SVN repository.

Both methods, are described below.

Downloading the latest source package

Go to the Code::Blocks web site and download the latest source package. This would be the " Code::Blocks IDE version 1.0rc2 source code (tarball)" codeblocks-1.0rc2.tar.gz. Save this file in ~/devel and then untar it:

cd ~/devel
tar zxf codeblocks-1.0rc2.tar.gz

This will create the directory ~/devel/codeblocks-1.0rc2. Change to the source code directory, by issuing the following command:

cd codeblocks-1.0rc2

Getting the latest sources from SVN

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The Sourceforge CVS is no longer used although it still exists

Enter your development directory:

cd ~/devel

Then checkout the source using one of these methods.

This will create the directory trunk. Change to the source code directory, by issuing the following command:

cd trunk

Building Code::Blocks RC2 and SVN

If you are a Gentoo user, please see Compiling_Code::Blocks_in_Gentoo.

Before beginning, it is often a good idea to check you have recent versions of autoconf and automake - repositories versions are not always recent enough.

If you're compiling the svn trunk versions of CodeBlocks (or future versions) then the unix build has switched to autotools. So first build wxWidgets as described above and then build CodeBlocks as follows:

./bootstrap

This sets up the configure script and it's dependencies. It only needs to be run once (after downloading the source from svn). If you get errors like:

aclocal:configure.in:61: warning: macro `AM_OPTIONS_WXCONFIG' not found in library

Then aclocal is having trouble finding the wxWidgets .m4 files. You can do one of two things: To just get bootstrap to find the path this time do:

export ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I `wx-config --prefix`/share/aclocal"

To change the aclocal search path more permanently do:

echo `wx-config --prefix`/share/aclocal >> /usr/share/aclocal/dirlist

Then aclocal will also search somewhere like /opt/wx/2.6/share/aclocal

Note for Ubuntu users: The above is not the correct way to fix the AM_* errors. Rather, you only need to install the package named "wx-common" (Universe repository).

If you get something like

The usual way to define `LIBTOOL' is to add `AC_PROG_LIBTOOL'

it can be solved by something like: (adapt path, use `wx-config --prefix` is necessary)

ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I /usr/share/aclocal" ./bootstrap

(*Note// If you run ./bootstrap and get errors like:

: bad interpreter: File not found

then there exists a problem with DOS line-endings. i had this error after i tried to build a codeblocks from sources which were checked out with cvs on a windows machine. After i checked out a fresh copy of codeblocks from cvs under Ubuntu linux (see above topic: Downloading the latest source package fom SVN), all errors were gone. //tiwag 051008*)
Or, instead of downloading from SVN, you might consider using the little command line tool dos2unix, which normally comes with most distributions. //lizzarddude060103
If configure aborts with some unspecific error message(".infig.status: error: cannot find input file: Makefile"), you might consider also running

dos2unix bootstrap acinclude.m4 codeblocks.pc.in configure.in Makefile.am

before running bootstrap

Once you've run the bootstrap script, installing is as simple as:

./configure
make
make install

If you have multiple versions of wxWidgets installed or kept them inplace, you can use ./configure --with-wx-config=/path/to/wx-config

To uninstall you can later run:

make uninstall

If you want to recompile everything, first run:

make clean
make distclean
make clean-bin
make clean-zipfiles

and then follow the above sequence for installing.

By default, CodeBlocks will install to /usr/local. If you want it in its own tree (so you can have multiple versions of CodeBlocks, each in its own subdirectory of /opt) replace the above ./configure command with:

./configure --prefix=/opt/codeblocks-svn

or similar. Then you can later install a different build like:

./configure --prefix=/opt/codeblocks2-svn

followed by 'make && make install' as usual.

By default, CodeBlocks will not compile the contributed plugins from SVN. If you want to compile / install them too, replace the above ./configure command with:

./configure --enable-contrib

followed by 'make && make install' as usual.

To see a list of other options available for configuring the build of CodeBlocks do:

./configure --help

To compile under gentoo, use

./configure --with-wx-config=wx-config-2.6

Building Code::Blocks RC1 and former

To build Code::Blocks all you have to do now is type:

make -f Makefile.unix

This will build everything: the application and the plugins. The final step is to update the working environment for your system:

make -f Makefile.unix update

The following notes about converting the line endings does not apply to the CVS Version! The "update" script included there works just fine.

Important note: Don't run that final make yet! The "update" script seems to be using Dos character encoding, which will result in its failure to run on Linux. To fix this, use dos2unix:

To install it in Gentoo, do:

# emerge -av dos2unix

In Debian and Ubuntu, do (as root, or using sudo etc.):

# apt-get install sysutils

This will install dos2unix. Now we are ready to convert the script.

# dos2unix -n update update.unix
# chmod +x update.unix
# ./update.unix

The first line converts the script character encoding, the second makes it executable and the third runs it. This trick is from a forum post by ilkapo.

OK. Now that the update script is converted to unix format, you can run the final make:

make -f Makefile.unix update

If everything's gone well, congratulations! You should be able to launch Code::Blocks by running the generated run.sh script in the output subdir:

output/run.sh

This script can be ran from anywhere in your system so, yes, you can make a shortcut to it on your desktop ;)

Enjoy!