Building from sources

 

This page is a step-by-step guide for building and installing in Ubuntu and derivatives. Please, adapt these instructions and commands for your Linux distro. If you would like to contribute, please email me your patches and instructions for other distros so that I can update this building guide. Thank you.

Before starting, you should know that LenMus source tree does not include makefiles. All makefiles are generated with CMake build system. CMake can generate different kinds of native build files for many systems and IDEs (e.g. Unix Makefiles, Eclipse CDT 4.0 project files, Visual Studio project files, and many other). The procedure described here is for installing from command line, using a Linux makefile.

Step 1: Install prerequisites

LenMus needs the wxWidgets libraries and the following additional libraries: portmidi, sqlite3, FreeType2, FluidSynth, libpng, zlib and fontconfig. Most of them are normally already installed in Linux systems. In any case, there is no harm in trying to install them, just in case any is missing. Open a terminal window and type:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install cmake
sudo apt-get install libportmidi-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev
sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev libpng++-dev zlib1g-dev libwxgtk3.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libfluidsynth-dev
sudo apt-get install libfontconfig1-dev

Step 2: Download source code and prepare to build

Lets assume you have a folder named 'projects'. We are going to create there a sub-folder for all LenMus sources and download them from master repository at GitHub, either the latest code:

cd projects
git clone -b master --single-branch --depth 1 https://github.com/lenmus/lenmus.git
cd lenmus

or a specific Release (e.g. 5.4.2)

cd projects
git clone -b '5.4.2' --single-branch --depth 1 https://github.com/lenmus/lenmus.git
cd lenmus

Once the sources are downloaded, let's create a folder for building:

mkdir my-build

Now you will have the following folders structure:

    projects
       +-- lenmus
               +-- src
               +-- include
               +-- ...
               +-- my-build

Step 3: Generate the makefiles, build and install

Now run cmake to check for the required build dependencies and to generate the makefile. If cmake fails, install the missing dependencies and repeat this step until the command runs successfully:

cd my-build
cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" ../

Now you can compile the sources and build (it is a lot of code to compile and this could take a few minutes, depending on your computer):

make -j2      #change 2 by the number of processors in your machine

If previous command completes successfully you can install and run the program:

sudo make install
lenmus

 

Your comments and fixes to these instructions are welcome. Thank you.

 

Last updated: 2020/02/24