Chapter 2. bluefish installation

Table of Contents

requirements
quick standard installation
general installation issues
how to get bluefish
operating systems supported by bluefish
which bluefish version to use
how and when updates are released
system specific notes
installing a bluefish source distribution
quick installation overview
typical configure options
installing from development source tree
problems compiling?
installing a binary distribution
post-installation setup

about different methods to have bluefish installed (distribution or own installation)

requirements

Bluefish aims to be portable, hopefully wherever GTK is ported. A comparatively small set of external libraries are neccessary for it to work. Any recent GNU/Linux distribution or other *NIX with GTK2 installed, will be sufficient. In addition to the list of requirements below, you may also want to look at the section called “system specific notes”. Note: These requirements fit the GTK2-version. If you only have GTK1, you want the last GTK1-version, v0.7.

The main requirements:

  • gtk v2.0
  • glib v2.0
  • pango 1.0

Optional requirements:

  • libpcre3 - for Perl Regular Expression support
  • libaspell - spell checker
  • grep & find - used by the advanced open dialog. Remember to add link to the advanced open description

Compiling Bluefish require a few additional packages. (Do remember that binary packages exists for many platforms. It is likely you won't need to compile ;-) ). Now, lets assume you want to compile, perhaps to get the latest and greatest from CVS. The requirements are as follows:

  • Development files (header files etc) for the packages above. These are often distributed as separate packages. There is also a high probability you have these installed already.
  • gcc - Bluefish has been tested to compile on the 2.95 and 3.x branches.
  • gmake or BSD make
  • autoconf - only if you are going to compile from CVS