Building C++ projects on Linux (or more specifically: building CLIPS on Ubuntu 9. 10)
I’m migrating from XP to Linux. (I’m new to Linux).
I have successfully installed CLIP on Ubuntu using SPM. HOWEVER, I WANT TO BUILD CLIPS FROM SOURCE – BECAUSE I WILL EXTEND ITS CURRENT FUNCTIONALITY.
I’ve started with
http://sourceforge.net/projects/clipsrules/files/CLIPS/
Go into my /home/morpheous/projects/CLIPS folder, I want to build it now. However, I’m new to GNU build tools and make (I’ve already run sudo aptitude install build-essential).
Can anyone provide any help/instructions on how I build CLIPS (I suspect I might need to build an X11 interface – but for now lower priority).
Solution
Usually you use make programs to build applications from source, and almost all C/C++ applications provide a makefile that describes what to build and how.
In general, you will type
./configure
make
make install
These will:
- Run a configuration shell script that sets up your build environment, setting things like the CPU and operating system you’re using.
- Build the source code using the standard-named makefile that comes with the project.
- Use a special Install target in makefile to copy the necessary files to their final location.
Edit: Here’s a brief description from the Linux documentation project.
By the way, regarding dependent projects, I would try to install them directly from your package repository (i.e. yum or apt-get), since you usually don’t need to build them, just to use them. Sometimes you may need to get development resources such as header files and libraries, but you can also get those resources from the repository – they will be called names like xxx-devel, for example. “kernel-devel”, so yum install kernel-devel will give you everything you need to develop kernel modules without having to build the kernel itself.