1 Compiling and installing LyX
2 ============================
4 Quick compilation guide
5 -----------------------
7 These four steps will compile, test and install LyX:
9 0) Linux users beware: You need qt5 and qt5-devel packages
10 of the same version to compile LyX.
12 In general, it is also recommended to have pkg-config
13 installed (the name might vary depending on your
16 1) ./configure configures LyX according to your system. You
17 may have to set --with-qt-dir=<path-to-your-qt-installation>
18 (for example, "--with-qt-dir=/usr/share/qt5/") if the
19 environment variable QTDIR is not set and pkg-config is not
22 See Note below if ./configure script is not present.
28 runs the program so you can check it out.
31 will install it. You can use "make install-strip" instead
32 if you want a smaller binary.
35 Note for Git checkouts
36 -----------------------------
38 If you have checked this out from Git, you need to have:
39 * automake (supported versions are 1.14--1.15)
40 * autoconf (supported versions are 2.65--2.69)
41 Then type "./autogen.sh" to build the needed configuration
42 files and proceed as stated above/below.
44 You will also probably need GNU m4 (perhaps installed as gm4).
50 First of all, you will need a recent C++ compiler, where recent means
51 that the compilers are close to C++11 standard conforming like gcc (at
54 LyX makes great use of the C++ Standard Template Library (STL).
55 This means that gcc users will have to install the relevant libstdc++
56 library to be able to compile this version of LyX.
58 For full LyX usability we suggest to use Qt 5.6 and higher, or at the
59 very least Qt 5.4. For compilation you need to compile against at least
60 Qt 4.8 which has been widely tested, and for Windows we advise at least
61 Qt 4.8.4. The only special point to make is that you must ensure that
62 both LyX and the Qt libraries are compiled with the same C++ compiler.
64 To build LyX with spell checking capabilities included you have to
65 install at least one of the development packages of the spell checker
66 libraries. See the RELEASE-NOTES for details.
69 * Other things to note
71 If you make modifications to the source that affect any of the
72 translations or you change the translation files themselves (po/*.po)
73 files, you will need to have the GNU gettext package installed to
74 compile LyX with up-to-date translations (at least gettext version
75 0.16.1 is needed). You can get the latest version from:
76 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/
78 The two following programs should be available at configuration time:
80 o Python 2.7 must be installed. Python is used for many simple tasks
81 that are executed by external scripts, such as the automatic
82 configuration step and the import of older LyX documents with the
83 lyx2lyx script (this script is called automatically when opening a
84 file). Python 3 (3.3 or later) support is work in progress.
90 LyX can be configured using GNU autoconf utility which attempts to guess
91 the configuration needed to suit your system. The standard way to use it
92 is described in the file INSTALL.autoconf. In most cases you will be able
93 to create the Makefile by typing
97 For more complicated cases, LyX configure honors the following specific
100 o --enable-build-type=[rel(ease), pre(release), dev(elopment), prof(iling), gprof]
101 allows to tweak the compiled code. The following table describes
102 the settings in terms of various options that are described later
104 release prerelease development profiling gprof
105 optimization -O2 -O2 -O -O2 -O2
111 The defaults are as follows in terms of version number
112 release: stable release (2.x.y)
113 prerelease: version number contains alpha, beta, rc or pre.
114 development: version number contains dev.
116 The `profiling' build type uses the -fno-omit-frame-pointer option with gcc
118 The `gprof' build type compiles and links with -pg option with gcc.
120 o --with-extra-lib=DIRECTORY that specifies the path where LyX will
121 find extra libraries (qt4) it needs. Defaults to NONE
122 (i.e. search in standard places). You can specify several
123 directories, separated by colons.
125 o --with-extra-inc=DIRECTORY that gives the place where LyX will find
126 extra headers. Defaults to NONE (i.e. search in standard places).
127 You can specify several directories, separated by colons.
129 o --with-extra-prefix[=DIRECTORY] that is equivalent to
130 --with-extra-lib=DIRECTORY/lib --with-extra-inc=DIRECTORY/include
131 If DIRECTORY is not specified, the current prefix is used.
133 o --with-version-suffix[=SUFFIX] will install LyX as lyxSUFFIX. The
134 LyX data directory will be something like <whatever>/lyxSUFFIX/.
135 Additionally your user configuration files will be found in e.g.
136 $HOME/.lyxSUFFIX. The default for SUFFIX is "-<currentversion>",
139 You can use this feature to install more than one version of LyX
140 on the same system. You can optionally specify a "version" of your
141 own, by doing something like :
142 ./configure --with-version-suffix=-latestdev
144 Note that the standard configure options --program-prefix,
145 --program-suffix and the others will not affect the shared LyX
146 directory etc. so it is recommended that you use --with-version-suffix
147 (or --prefix) instead.
149 There are also flags to control the internationalization support in
152 o --disable-nls suppresses all internationalization support,
153 yielding somewhat smaller code.
155 o You can also set the environment variable LINGUAS to a list of
156 languages in case you do not want to install all the translation
157 files. For example, if you are only interested in German and
158 Finnish, you can type (with sh or bash)
159 export LINGUAS='de fi'
160 before running configure.
162 Moreover, the following generic configure flags may be useful:
164 o --prefix=DIRECTORY specifies the root directory to use for
165 installation. [defaults to /usr/local]
167 o --datadir=DIRECTORY gives the directory where all extra LyX
168 files (documentation, templates and layout definitions)
170 [defaults to ${prefix}/share/lyx${program_suffix}]
172 o --bindir=DIRECTORY gives the directory where the lyx binary
173 will be installed. [defaults to ${prefix}/bin]
175 o --mandir=DIRECTORY gives the directory where the man pages will go.
176 [defaults to ${prefix}/man]
178 o --enable-maintainer-mode enables some code that automatically
179 rebuilds the configure script, makefiles templates and other useful
180 files when needed. This is off by default on releases, to avoid
183 Note that the --with-extra-* commands are not really robust when it
184 comes to using relative paths. If you really want to use a relative path
185 here, you can prepend it with "`pwd`/".
187 If you do not like the default compile flags used (-g -O2 on gcc), you can
188 set CXXFLAGS variable to other values as follows:
190 o CXXFLAGS='-O2' (sh, bash)
191 o setenv CXXFLAGS '-O2' (csh, tcsh)
193 Similarly, if you want to force the use of a specific compiler, you can
194 give a value to the CXX variable.
196 If you encounter problems, please read the section 'Problems' at the end of
199 The following options allow you to tweak the generated code more precisely (see the description of --enable-build-type for the default values):
201 o --enable-optimization=VALUE enables you to set optimization to a
202 higher level than the default, for example --enable-optimization=-O3.
204 o --disable-optimization - you can use this to disable compiler
205 optimization of LyX. The compile may be much quicker with some
206 compilers, but LyX will run more slowly.
208 o --disable-std-regex forces the compiler to use boost::regex. The default is
209 to use std::regex for known good C++ libraries, but the test is not robust for clang.
210 --enable-std-regex will force the use of std::regex.
212 o --enable-debug will add debug information to your binary. This
213 requires a lot more disk space, but is a must if you want to try
214 to debug problems in LyX. There is no run-time penalty.
216 o --enable-warnings that make the compiler output more warnings during
217 the compilation of LyX. Opposite is --disable-warnings.
219 o --enable-assertions that make the compiler generate run-time
220 code which checks that some variables have sane values. Opposite
221 is --disable-assertions.
223 o --enable-stdlib-debug adds some debug code in the standard
224 library; this slows down the code, but has been helpful in the
225 past to find bugs. Note that this is in general incompatible with
226 the system boost library (which is used when
227 --without-included-boost is specified). You may have to use
228 --disable-stdlib-debug when linking development versions against
229 your system's boost library.
231 o --enable-monolithic-build[=boost,client,insets,mathed,core,tex2lyx,frontend-qt4]
232 that enables monolithic build of the given parts of the source
233 code. This should reduce the compilation time provided you have
234 enough memory (>500MB).
237 Compiling and installing LyX
238 ----------------------------
240 Once you've got the Makefile created, you just have to type:
247 Since the binaries with debug information tend to be huge (although
248 this does not affect the run-time memory footprint), you might want
249 to strip the lyx binary. In this case replace "make install" with
253 BTW: in the lib/images subdirectory there is also small icons
254 `lyx.png' and `lyx.svg', that can be used to display LyX documents in
257 If configure fails for some strange reason
258 ------------------------------------------
260 Even when configure fails, it creates a Makefile. You can always check
261 the contents of this file, modify it and run 'make'.
263 Compiling For Multiple Architectures
264 ------------------------------------
266 You can compile LyX for more than one kind of computer at the same
267 time, by placing the object files for each architecture in their own
268 directory. To do this, you must use a version of `make' that supports
269 the `VPATH' variable, such as GNU `make'. `cd' to the directory where
270 you want the object files and executables to go and run the
271 `configure' script. `configure' automatically checks for the source
272 code in the directory that `configure' is in and in `..'.
274 If you have to use a `make' that does not support the `VPATH'
275 variable, you have to compile LyX for one architecture at a time in
276 the source code directory. After you have installed LyX for one
277 architecture, use `make distclean' before reconfiguring for another
283 This section provides several hints that have been submitted by LyX
284 team members or users to help compiling on some particular
285 architectures. If you find that some of these hints are wrong, please
288 o On SUN Sparc Solaris, you need gnumake. The LyX makefiles do not
289 work with Solaris make.
291 The Solaris 8 ar seg-faults trying to build the insets library. You
292 will need to use the ar from the GNU binutils for this subdirectory.
293 There is no problem with the Solaris 9 and 10 ar.
295 Qt4 uses the Xrender X11 extension for antialiased fonts. This
296 extension was added to Xsun starting from the Solaris 10 8/07
297 release, but it is not activated by default. To activate it, you
298 must issue (as root) the following command:
299 svccfg -s svc:/application/x11/x11-server setprop options/server_args=+xrender
300 and then restart the X server.
302 There is a problem with the fontconfig library shipped with
303 Solaris 10 8/07 causing a seg-fault when it is used by Qt4.
304 Until this is fixed, a workaround is replacing the shared library
305 /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 with a copy from a previous release or
306 installing a new version of fontconfig from http://www.sunfreeware.com/
308 On Solaris, the default fontconfig configuration gives preference
309 to bitmap fonts at (not so small) sizes. As bitmapped fonts are not
310 antialiased, you may prefer changing this configuration. This may be
311 done by adding the following stanza
313 <match target="pattern">
314 <edit name="prefer_bitmap">
319 to either ~/.fonts.conf (for a per-user change) or /etc/fonts/local.conf
320 (for a global system change). The stanza should be added between the
321 <fontconfig> and </fontconfig> tags. If neither ~/.fonts.conf nor
322 /etc/fonts/local.conf exists, you can create them with the following
325 <?xml version="1.0"?>
326 <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
328 <match target="pattern">
329 <edit name="prefer_bitmap">