Linux Developer Tools

Installing the developer tool is pretty easy on most Linux workstations. Here we detail the setups we have performed. QT Creator work well as an IDE on Linux as well.

Ubuntu Install

Installing the developer tools on Ubuntu is incredibly easy. Just run this one command from a terminal and it will install all the tools at once for you.
sudo apt-get install g++ gdb codeblocks git-core pkg-config cmake autoconf
or
sudo apt-get install g++ gdb qtcreator git-core pkg-config cmake autoconf
optionally you can mix in “cmake-gui” if you do not want to run cmake exclusively from the command prompt.

Fedora Install

These have not been updated since fedora 12, so use anything outside the Ubuntu instructions with caution.

Fedora 12 uses yum as it’s package manager, also, gdb and pkgconfig are installed by default so we will exclude them from our command. To install the developer tools, we need to run this command at the terminal:
su -c 'yum install gcc-c++ codeblocks git-core cmake doxygen autoconf'

Yum will download and install these packages as well as the dependencies for these packages.

Note that doxygen is not mandatory, but is useful and easy to install, So we recommend it.

Getting the Source Code

Once you have the tools installed all you should have to do to get the code repository is run the following command
git clone git://github.com/BlackToppStudios/Mezzanine.git

Preparing for Compilation

Before you can compile the Mezzanine Engine and Catch! you will need to install the libraries that the engine is built on top of. See the Installing Linux Libs page for more details.

What Are the Tools

Most of the Tools are explained on the Developer Tools and Training page, but some we have included here because they seem to get more use on Linux workstations.

GCC – g++

This is C++ compiler. It turns source code into software

GCC – gdb

This is a debugger that works with g++.

Cmake

Cmake is a tool to aid in the compiling of specially setup programs, like the Ogre 3d library.

Code::Blocks or QT Creator

Are both Integrated development environments that bring most of these other tools together into one friendly UI.

Doxygen

This is an automatic tool for extracting documentation from source code. This one is optional, as you can use versions of the documentation that we have built. Doxygen Documentation. If you want to use doxygen to build the API documentation you will need to install “texlive-font-utils doxygen” (in ubuntu anyway). Then run the “BuildApiDocs” script in the “Mezzanine/Mezzanine/src” folder.

Git

Git is a powerful revision control system. We use to merge our many changes and be certain that we have teh most recent version of the source code.

autoconf and pkg-config

These are older style tools used to create build scripts. SDL requires these for its build process and are used when “BuildPosixLibs.sh” is run.

What’s next

If you aren’t comfortable with your codings skills C++ Lessons. If you are comfortable with you coding skill and have the tools installed check out the Libraries Needed for Mezzanine to run and compile or go straight on to Building the Engine if you think already have all the software installed.