Getting and Building Gtopo

At this time, gtopo is only available as source code, so a modicum of skill is needed to build it. Don't panic, just follow these instructions and let me know if you have questions or problems.

I build and run gtopo on fedora linux systems, and my MAC OS-X macbook. Ubuntu linux users are also running gtopo. If you are running gtopo on some other system, let me know so I can add to the list. Especially if you had to do something "special", let me know so I can add your tips to this section.

Getting Gtopo

Go to the gtopo downloads page and click on the link to download the latest version. This should deposit a compressed tar file on your system, something with a name like:

gtopo-0.9.12.tar.gz

Now, decide where you want to unpack this tar file. The following command:

tar xzvf gtopo-0.9.12.tar.gz

Will unpack the tar file, creating a directory (within your current directory) with the name gtopo-0.9.12 (or something similar) containing all the source files.

Requirements

You will need the gnu C compiler and the make utility. These are typical standard components of most linux distributions, but you may need to select C software development tools or who knows what to get them if you have a severely pruned install. You also need the gtk 2.0 development packages, which may not be quite so standard. This is probably what is wrong if you try to compile and get lots of errors, starting with complaints about missing header files that look like this:

make
cc -c -g gtopo.c -g `pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0`
Package gtk+-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gtk+-2.0.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'gtk+-2.0' found
gtopo.c:21:21: error: gtk/gtk.h: No such file or directory

On a fedora system, you may need to do this:

yum install gtk2-devel

On a ubuntu system, you may need something like this:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev

On either system, this will probably pull in a million dependencies, just say yes and dive in.

Building

This is simple (as long as you have a typical linux install including gcc and the gtk libraries). Just do this:

cd gtopo-0.9.8
make

This will yield the gtopo executable. You will probably want to copy it to some directory on your search path, such as ~/bin or /usr/local/bin.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Gtopo / [email protected]