Building wxGTK

wxGTK installation

Prerequisites

You'll need the GTK development package for your platform (e.g. libgtk2.0-dev)

Getting wxGTK

Browse to the wxWidgets download page. Under wxWidgets 2.8.7 downloads, select wxGTK. 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-2.8.7.tar.gz

Switch to the wxGTK directory:

cd wxGTK-2.8.7

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).

wxFormBuilder uses the unicode monolithic library, so pass the flags to configure.

mkdir build_gtk2_shared_monolithic_unicode
cd build_gtk2_shared_monolithic_unicode
../configure --prefix=/opt/wx/2.8.7 --enable-xrc --enable-monolithic --enable-unicode
make

You need to be root to finish so run one of the following two commands, depending on your platform. su or sudo -s

Install the libraries.

make install

Add /opt/wx/2.8.7/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf (nano /etc/ld.so.conf) then run:

ldconfig

Log out of root.

exit

That's it. Now the linker will look in /opt/wx/2.8.7/lib for wx libraries and you will have a monolithic shared library unicode build.

Setting up wx-config

wxFormBuilder relies heavily on a tool called wx-config to build. This allows the build process to use whichever build of wxWidgets you have installed.

In addition to the libraries, make install installed wx-config for you. You just need to make sure it is working.

On debian systems, you'll need to add it to the alternatives system so that it plays nice with versions of wxWidgets installed from the package manager. If you are on a debian based system (this includes Ubuntu), run this command:

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/wx-config wx-config /opt/wx/2.8.7/bin/wx-config 287

On other systems, you can just add /opt/wx/2.8.7/bin to your PATH (there may be a better way that I do not know of). If you're shell is bash then edit /etc/profile or ~/.bash_profile. On Suse 10.1 edit /etc/profile.local. It might only be available after a new login. An example PATH

export PATH=/usr/bin:/opt/wx/2.8.7/bin:$PATH

To check that things are working, type:

wx-config --prefix

which should give you /opt/wx/2.8.7

On debian based systems

which wx-config

should return /usr/bin/wx-config and

update-alternatives --list wx-config

should show /opt/wx/2.8.7/bin/wx-config as the alternative in use.

On other systems

which wx-config

should return /opt/wx/2.8.7/bin/wx-config

Also see make sure wx-config is working before attempting to build wxFormBuilder.