IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you experience problems installing, please re-read these instructions and other related files (todo.txt, bugs.txt and osname.txt for your platform if it exists) carefully before mailing wx-users or the author. Preferably, try to fix the problem first and then send a patch to the author.
When sending bug reports tell us what version of wxWidgets you are using (including the beta) and what compiler on what system. One example: wxMotif 2.8.1, gcc 2.95.4, Redhat 6.1
You can now use configure to build wxWidgets and the samples.
Using configure is the only way to build the library. If it doesn't work for you for whatever reason, please report it (together with detailed information about your platform and the (relevant part of) contents of config.log file).
If you compile wxWidgets on Linux for the first time and don't like to read install instructions just do (in the base dir):
> ./configure --with-motif > make > su <type root password> > make install > ldconfig > exit
Afterwards you can continue with
> make > su <type root password> > make install > ldconfig > exit
If you want to remove wxWidgets on Unix you can do this:
> su <type root password> > make uninstall > ldconfig > exit
If you want to do some more serious cross-platform programming with wxWidgets, such as for GTK and Motif, you can now build two complete libraries and use them concurrently. For this end, you have to create a directory for each build of wxWidgets - you may also want to create different versions of wxWidgets and test them concurrently. Most typically, this would be a version configured with –enable-debug and one without.
For building three versions (one GTK, one Motif and a debug version of the GTK source) you'd do this:
mkdir buildmotif cd buildmotif ../configure --with-motif make cd .. mkdir buildgtk cd buildgtk ../configure --with-gtk make cd .. mkdir buildgtkd cd buildgtkd ../configure --with-gtk --enable-debug make cd ..
Note that since wxWidgets-2.6.0 you can install all those libraries concurrently, you just need to pass the appropriate flags when using them.
You get errors during compilation: The reason is that you probably have a broken compiler. GCC 2.8 and earlier versions and egcs are likely to cause problems due to incomplete support for C++ and optimisation bugs. Best to use GCC 2.95 or later.
You get immediate segfault when starting any sample or application: This is either due to having compiled the library with different flags or options than your program - typically you might have the __WXDEBUG__
option set for the library but not for your program - or due to using a compiler with optimisation bugs.
Now create your super-application myfoo.app and compile anywhere with
g++ myfoo.cpp `wx-config --libs --cxxflags` -o myfoo
The Unix variants of wxWidgets use GNU configure. If you have problems with your make use GNU make instead.
If you have general problems with installation, see the wxWidgets website at
for newest information. If you still don't have any success, please send a bug report to one of our mailing lists (see my homepage) INCLUDING A DESCRIPTION OF YOUR SYSTEM AND YOUR PROBLEM, SUCH AS YOUR VERSION OF MOTIF, WXMOTIF, WHAT DISTRIBUTION YOU USE AND WHAT ERROR WAS REPORTED. I know this has no effect, but I tried...
wxWidgets/Motif requires the Motif library to be installed on your system. As an alternative, you may also use the free library "lesstif" which implements most of the Motif API without the licence restrictions of Motif.
You can get the newest version of the Lesstif from the lesstif homepage at:
http://lesstif.sourceforge.net/
wxWidgets/Motif requires a thread library and X libraries known to work with threads. This is the case on all commercial Unix-Variants and all Linux-Versions that are based on glibc 2 except RedHat 5.0 which is broken in many aspects. As of writing this, virtually all Linux distributions have correct glibc 2 support.
You can disable thread support by running
./configure --disable-threads make su <type root password> make install ldconfig exit
The normal build instructions should work fine on Cygwin. The one difference with Cygwin is that when using the "--enable-shared" configure option (which is the default) the API is exported explicitly using __declspec(dllexport) rather than all global symbols being available.
This shouldn't make a difference using the library and should be a little more efficient. However if an export attribute has been missed somewhere you will see linking errors. If this happens then you can work around the problem by setting LDFLAGS=-Wl,–export-all-symbols. Please also let us know about it on the wx-dev mailing list.
Usage:
./configure [options]
If you want to use system's C and C++ compiler, set environment variables CXX and CC as
% setenv CC cc % setenv CXX CC % ./configure options
to see all the options please use:
./configure --help
The basic philosophy is that if you want to use different configurations, like a debug and a release version, or use the same source tree on different systems, you have only to change the environment variable OSTYPE. (Sadly this variable is not set by default on some systems in some shells - on SGI's for example). So you will have to set it there. This variable HAS to be set before starting configure, so that it knows which system it tries to configure for.
Configure will complain if the system variable OSTYPE has not been defined. And Make in some circumstances as well...
Given below are the commands to change the default behaviour, i.e. if it says "--disable-threads" it means that threads are enabled by default.
Many of the configure options have been thoroughly tested in wxWidgets snapshot 6, but not yet all (ODBC not).
You have to add –with-motif on platforms, where Motif is not the default (on Linux, configure will default to GTK).
--with-motif Use either Motif or Lesstif Configure will look for both.
The following options handle the kind of library you want to build.
--disable-threads Compile without thread support. Threads support is also required for the socket code to work. --disable-shared Do not create shared libraries. --enable-monolithic Build wxWidgets as single library instead of as several smaller libraries (which is the default since wxWidgets 2.5.0). --disable-optimise Do not optimise the code. Can sometimes be useful for debugging and is required on some architectures such as Sun with gcc 2.8.X which would otherwise produce segvs. --enable-profile Add profiling info to the object files. Currently broken, I think. --enable-no_rtti Enable compilation without creation of C++ RTTI information in object files. This will speed-up compilation and reduce binary size. --enable-no_exceptions Enable compilation without creation of C++ exception information in object files. This will speed-up compilation and reduce binary size. Also fewer crashes during the actual compilation... --enable-permissive Enable compilation without checking for strict ANSI conformance. Useful to prevent the build dying with errors as soon as you compile with Solaris' ANSI-defying headers. --enable-mem_tracing Add built-in memory tracing. --enable-dmalloc Use the dmalloc memory debugger. Read more at www.letters.com/dmalloc/ --enable-debug Equivalent to --enable-debug_info plus --enable-debug-flag. --enable-debug_info Add debug info to object files and executables for use with debuggers such as gdb (or its many frontends). --enable-debug_flag Define __DEBUG__ and __WXDEBUG__ when compiling. This enable wxWidgets' very useful internal debugging tricks (such as automatically reporting illegal calls) to work. Note that program and library must be compiled with the same debug options.
Many of the configure options have been thoroughly tested in wxWidgets snapshot 6, but not yet all (ODBC not).
When producing an executable that is linked statically with wxGTK you'll be surprised at its immense size. This can sometimes be drastically reduced by removing features from wxWidgets that are not used in your program. The most relevant such features are
--without-libpng Disables PNG image format code. --without-libjpeg Disables JPEG image format code. --without-libtiff Disables TIFF image format code. --without-expat Disable XML classes based on Expat parser. --disable-threads Disables threads. Will also disable sockets. --disable-sockets Disables sockets. --disable-dnd Disables Drag'n'Drop. --disable-clipboard Disables Clipboard. --disable-streams Disables the wxStream classes. --disable-file Disables the wxFile class. --disable-textfile Disables the wxTextFile class. --disable-intl Disables the internationalisation. --disable-validators Disables validators. --disable-accel Disables accel.
Apart from disabling certain features you can very often "strip" the program of its debugging information resulting in a significant reduction in size.
Please see the output of "./configure --help" for comprehensive list of all configurable options.
The following must be done in the base directory (e.g. ~/wxMotif or ~/wxWin or whatever)
Now the makefiles are created (by configure) and you can compile the library by typing:
make
make yourself some coffee, as it will take some time. On an old Pentium 200 around 40 minutes. During compilation, you may get a few warning messages depending in your compiler.
If you want to be more selective, you can change into a specific directory and type "make" there.
Then you may install the library and its header files under /usr/local/include/wx and /usr/local/lib respectively. You have to log in as root (i.e. run "su" and enter the root password) and type
make install
You can remove any traces of wxWidgets by typing
make uninstall
If you want to save disk space by removing unnecessary object-files:
make clean
in the various directories will do the work for you.
g++ myfoo.cpp `wx-config --libs` `wx-config --cxxflags` -o myfoo Using this way, a make file for the minimal sample would look like this CXX = g++ minimal: minimal.o $(CXX) -o minimal minimal.o `wx-config --libs` minimal.o: minimal.cpp $(CXX) `wx-config --cxxflags` -c minimal.cpp -o minimal.o clean: rm -f *.o minimal If your application uses only some of wxWidgets libraries, you can specify required libraries when running wx-config. For example, `wx-config --libs=html,core` will only output link command to link with libraries required by core GUI classes and wxHTML classes. See the manual for more information on the libraries.
# makewxmotif # Sets permissions (in case we extracted wxMotif from zip files) # and makes wxMotif. # Call from top-level wxWidgets directory. # Note that this uses standard (but commonly-used) configure options; # if you're feeling brave, you may wish to compile with threads: # if they're not supported by the target platform, they will be disabled # anyhow # -- Julian Smart chmod a+x configure config.sub config.guess ./configure --with-shared --with-motif --with-debug_flag --with-debug_info --enable-debug --without-threads --without-sockets --without-odbc makeThis script will build wxMotif using shared libraries. If you want to build a static wxWidgets library, use –disable-shared.