By installing Bluefish from source, you may be able to get a newer version (CVS Snapshot, perhaps) than those distributed as binaries. You may also need to compile from source if there is no available binary for your system.
This is the short installation description. Consult the other chapters if you are in doubt.
Bluefish installed using the standard 'configure, make, make install' steps. Assuming you have downloaded a bluefish source package, for instance bluefish-ver.tar.gz (naturally, change the filename to what's appropriate), you complete the installation with the following steps:
The configure script is used to automatically find the appropriate settings for your system. Because of differences between systems, this compile-time configuration is neccessary, and configure solves this challenge easily -- with an added bonus of telling whether you have everything you need to compile.
The configure-script can be configured, specifying locations of shared libraries or similar. This is something you most likely won't need to do, but it's easy to do if neccessary. For a complete list of configure options, type
$ ./configure --help
The Bluefish-specific configure options are
You might also need these:
So, you want the bleeding edge? This guide will help you download and install the latest source from our CVS repository.
CVS[3], a version control system, is a much used software development tool. It keeps track of all changes to the sourcecode, who did what and why they did it. If you want to read more about CVS, have a look at the CVS-book by Karl Fogel, available at http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html.
The Bluefish project's CVS is generously hosted by SourceForge.net[4]. For more information about them, see their site. The project homepage is http://sourceforge.net/projects/bluefish. Our CVS repository contains the current Bluefish sourcecode, and even this manual. The repository is accessible by anyone, and is updated almost daily by the developers.
To access the repository, you need a few small utilities. You may have to install them. They are likely to be available through your favourite source of software (ports, apt etc). The above mentioned CVS-book is a great source for information.
The first step is to cd to the directory you want to put the sources in, and then log in. The latter is accomplished with this command:
$ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.bluefish.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/bluefish login
(just hit Enter at the password prompt) The next step is to check out the sourcecode. You can check out single modules, and the one you want is called bluefish-gtk2. The command is:
$ cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.bluefish.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/bluefish co bluefish-gtk2
A lot of files will be downloaded, and listed one by one. If you're on dialup, this might take a bit of time. Be patient ;-)
When the download has completed, you'll find the bluefish sources in the subdir bluefish-gtk2. Enter that directory now:
$ cd bluefish-gtk
Next, you need to generate the configure script. That's accomplished by running
$ autoconf
Then, you run configure with whatever options you might want. This example will cause make install to install Bluefish with the specified directory as prefix (I.e. the binary is installed in /usr/locar/bf-cvs/bin/bluefish). This is most likely not what you want -- just run configure without parameters instead.
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/bf-cvs
If configure fails, it'll probably give a hint telling you what's missing or wrong. Assuming it completed successfully, your next step is to compile this thing. Run
$ make
to accomplish this. When make has completed, you can install Bluefish: (su to root first, unless you specified a user writeable prefix to configure)
# make install
To update the sources at a later time, you run the command cvs -z3 -q update from within the bluefish-gtk2 directory.
Can't compile? Well, your first step is to make sure you have the neccessary utilities and libraries. See the section called “requirements”. Next, see if your system is mentioned in the section called “system specific notes”. Below is list of well known problems that's been mentioned on the bluefish-dev list. If you're unable to find a solution (or if you think you have a solution others might want), feel free to contact us on the bluefish-dev list (See the section called “Contact Us”).
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.This will happen if configure fail and you try to run make. It also happens if you're running make from the wrong directory.