For the benefit of everyone, here's a step by step guide of how I
successfully compiled and installed lyx on ubuntu linux, from the
subversion source code repository. I never went back.
A) Downloading the source code
------------------------------
First you want the source files. There are two main development "lines",
one is the "trunk", which will be named 2.0 when it is released, and one
is the 1.6.x "branch", which includes bug fixes and some new features.
Major new features are being developed in trunk, then selectively added
to the 1.6.x branch. So trunk is "bleeding edge" and can sometimes break
things, branch is stable. That's why I recommend the branch.
To get these files and put them in your lyx-devel folder, you would do
svn co svn://svn.lyx.org/lyx/lyx-devel/branches/BRANCH_1_6_X lyx-devel
If you prefer trunk, then:
svn co svn://svn.lyx.org/lyx/lyx-devel/trunk lyx-devel
Use either command, not both. You then will see the tree of the lyx
source files being downloaded to your lyx-devel folder. Once you have
the code, you can do with it as you please. What you probably want to
do, is compile the code.
B) Compiling
------------
Compiling requires some dependencies. The easy thing to do on ubuntu,
which might just work, is to try
sudo apt-get build-dep lyx
This should do it. If you get strange errors while compiling later on,
we would have to revisit this assumption.
Let's say you want this compiled version of lyx to be called "lyx-svn".
The compilation process, or build process, for that is
cd lyx-devel
./autogen.sh
./configure --with-version-suffix=-svn
make
C) Install
----------
Next step is to install. Some people have mentioned stow. I have never
used it, but I am sure it is a good idea. Anyway, the easy way is to
sudo make install
Since in the build step we named our compiled version "lyx-svn", it
should not cause problems. Now you can summon
lyx-svn
to launch your shiny new lyx.
D) Keeping up-to-date
---------------------
When we first downloaded the source files, we took a snapshot of the
code at the current time. If you want the latest bug fixes and features
that were included since that time by the wonderful developers, you will
have to update the source, recompile, and reinstall. In short:
cd lyx-devel
svn update
./autogen.sh
./configure --with-version-suffix=-svn
make
sudo make install
E) Getting additional help
--------------------------
With the lyx source code comes extra text files with information about
installing and other topics. Check out INSTALL and README, in
particular, and see what's in there. Use whatever is convenient for you
to read those text files. Come back to this mailing list for help when
in trouble. Hopefully, all you ever want to know is in there. Even
though it can be quite daunting to compile lyx on your own, it is good
to learn to use these tools. You will find that many open source
projects use similar build procedure. You often benefit by compiling
yourself.
Good luck,
Julien
