Man 2 ch02

• 1. Requirements
• 2. Quick Standard Installation
• 3. System Specific Installation Issues
• 4. Installing a Bluefish Source Distribution
  • 4.1. Quick Installation Overview
  • 4.2. Installing from Development Source Tree
  • 4.3. Problems Compiling?
• 5. Configure Options
  • 5.1. Standard configuration flags
  • 5.2. Flags personal to bluefish
• 6. Installing a Binary Distribution
• 7. Post-installation Setup

1. Requirements

Bluefish aims to be portable; that is, wherever GTK is available, Bluefish will run. A comparatively small set of external libraries are necessary for it to work. Any recent GNU/Linux distribution or other *NIX with GTK2 installed should be sufficient. In addition to the list of requirements below, you may also want to look at Section 3, “System Specific Installation Issues”. Note that these requirements fit the GTK2 version.

The main requirements:

• gtk v2.0
• libpcre

Optional requirements:

• gnome_vfs - for remote file support
• libaspell - spell checker
• grep & find - used by the File → Open advanced... (Shift+Ctrl+O) dialog.

Compiling Bluefish requires a few additional packages. However, binary packages exist for many platforms, so it is likely you will not need to compile. Now, let us assume you want to compile, perhaps to get the latest and greatest from SVN. 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, 3.x, and 4.0.x branches.
• gmake or BSD make
• autoconf - only if you are going to compile from SVN
• gtk v2.4 at least - only if you are going to compile from SVN
• gnome_vfs 2.6 - only if you are going to compile from SVN
• libxml 2.0 - only if you are going to compile from SVN