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2. Installation

2.1 How to obtain eboxy

The latest version of eboxy is always available from the eboxy homepage, or from the SourceForge project page for eboxy, where you can also grab the absolute latest version from CVS as well as submit bugs, patches, etc.

2.2 Requirements

Apart from SDL_gui, many Linux distributions already include these required packages. Make sure you also have the "-devel" packages installed for each if your distribution has them.

Optional:

eboxy was developed and tested on Gentoo 1.4, Red Hat 7.3 and Slackware 8.1, but if you've got the requirements described above installed it should work on any Linux system. I would certainly be interested in getting it working on other Unix platforms, so give it a go and if you have any trouble please contact me and we'll try to work it out (actually, if it works fine on another platform I'd also like to hear about it). Given that it uses SDL it should be possible to port to Windows without too much difficulty too.

Note: see http://www.bluelightning.org/ebox/eboxy/gcc32.html for details on how to correctly install SDL_gui and eboxy on systems that use gcc 3.2 (eg. Mandrake 9.0).

Note: When installing SDL_gui, to make things easiest you should make sure it is installed into the same location (prefix) as SDL. This means if SDL is installed into /usr/lib, SDL_gui must be installed into /usr/lib as well (same goes for the other SDL support libraries). Normally, if you compile both SDL and SDL_gui from source, or install both from binary packages, this is not an issue. However if it's half and half (which it very well might be as most distributions don't have binaries for SDL_gui) you need to take care that this is done properly. The easiest way is to make sure any SDL packages you compile from source go into /usr/lib, by passing --prefix=/usr/lib to ./configure.

2.3 Compiling and installing

In order to compile and install eboxy on your system, type the following in the base directory of the eboxy distribution (you'll need to be root to run the last command):

./configure
make
make install

If you get errors from configure then there's probably something wrong with your paths or you don't have one of the required libraries. Firstly, make sure you have a line /usr/local/lib in your /etc/ld.so.conf file. Then (as root) run ldconfig which makes sure all installed libraries are accessible. Try running ./configure again and see if this fixed it. If not, have a look at config.log and see if that suggests anything. If not, email me with details of the problem you're having.

To test eboxy, simply cd into the skins/test directory and run eboxy. A simple test menu should appear for you to try out.


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