CompileOnUnix

Prerequisites
To compile FreeCAD under Linux you have to install all libraries mentioned in Third Party Libraries first. As compiler you should have installed gcc in a version newer that 3.x.y.

To avoid any linker problems during the build process it would be a good idea to have the library paths either in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable or in your ld.so.conf file.

During the compilation some Python scripts get executed. So the Python interpreter has to work properly.

For more details have also a look to README.Linux in your sources.

First of all you should build the Qt plugin that provides all custom widgets of FreeCAD we need for the Qt Designer. The sources are located under //src/Tools/plugins/widget//. So far we don't provide a makefile -- but calling qmake plugin.pro creates it. Once that's done, calling make will create the library //libFreeCAD_widgets.so//. To make this library known to your Qt Designer you have to copy the file to //$QTDIR/plugin/designer//.

Configuration
For the build process of FreeCAD we provide a configure script. Just type in ./configure --help to get an overview of all options you can specify. Normally you need none of them - unless you have one of your libraries installed in a really uncommon directory. After configuration has finished type make into your console.

If any bugs occurs while building from sources, please double-check this page and README.Linux file, then you could jump to the Bug Tracker on SourceForge, choose Any for status and click the Browse button to see previous reports on compile problems.

Installation
After having built FreeCAD successfully, with a simple make install you can install it onto your machine.The default install directory is /home/ /FreeCAD so you don't need root privileges therefore.