Welcome to Gambas!

Gambas is a free implementation of a graphical development environment based on a BASIC interpreter. It is very inspired by Visual Basic and Java.

More information on http://gambas.sourceforge.net

Important notes

Before downloading Gambas, compiling it and then complaining, please read the following remarks CAREFULLY!

To compile Gambas (the stable or development version), you must install the following libraries on your system :

Components	Libraries & requirements
Interpreter	libffi.so
gb.compress.bzlib2	libbz2.so
gb.compress.zlib	libz.so
gb.corba	libACE.so, libomniORB4.so, libomniDynamic4.so
gb.crypt	libcrypt.so
gb.db.firebird	libfbclient.so
gb.db.mysql	libmysqlclient.so, libz.so
gb.db.odbc	libodbc.so
gb.db.postgresql	libpq.so
gb.db.sqlite2	libsqlite.so
gb.db.sqlite3	libsqlite3.so
gb.desktop	libXtst.so
gb.gtk	All GTK+ libraries >= 2.10
gb.gtk.svg	librsvg2.so
gb.net.curl	libcurl.so
gb.opengl	libGL.so, libGLU.so
gb.pcre	libpcre.so
gb.pdf	libpoppler.so
gb.qt	libqt-mt.so.3 >= 3.3
gb.qt.kde	All KDE 3 libraries >= 3.5
gb.sdl	libSDL.so, libSDL_image.so, libGL.so, libGLU.so
gb.sdl.sound	libSDL.so, libSDL_mixer.so
gb.v4l	libjpeg.so, libpng.so,Video4Linux >= 2.0
gb.xml	libxml-2.0
gb.xml.xslt	libxslt

Try to always use a recent version of these libraries.

You must compile gb.qt and gb.qt.ext components to have a working development environment.

You must have the right to write to /tmp, otherwise Gambas will not work.

This package was done with the following versions of GNU tools:

• automake 1.9.4
• autoconf 2.59
• libtool 1.5.12

Each sub-directory of this source package is actually independent. You can configure, make and install each of them independently.

How To compile And Install Gambas?

Check installation

First, check that you installed all the needed libraries, and especially all the development packages.

Source package configuration

When you are sure that everything is installed, type the following magic sentences in a shell.

'$' represents your shell prompt, and '...' are the messages printed during the configuration and compilation.

This command creates the configuration script. You need to do that only if you get the sources from the subversion repository. This is unneeded if you downloaded a tar.bz2 source archive.

$ ./reconf-all

This command analyzes the system and configure the package:

$ ./configure -C
...

If a library or a development package is missing, then you will be warned that some components are disabled. You must read all the configure output to find the lines beginning with "warning" to know what is missing.

Compilation

If everything is configured without error, then run this command to compile the program:

$ make
...

Installation

If everything compiles without error, then enter this command to install everything:

$ su -c "make install"
Password: 
...

Troubleshooting

If you did several successive compilations, after having updated the source from the subversion repository for example, and if something fails during all this process, you can try to "reconfigure" the configuration scripts by typing the following command:

$ ./reconf

Then you can run ./configure again

If it does not work, I need to know what happened exactly. To do so, type the following command :

$ ( ./configure; make; make install ) > output.txt 2>&1

And send me the file "output.txt" by mail, with every other detail about your computer and your distribution you find useful.

Running Gambas

If everything was fine, type "gambas2" to run the development environment. Or "gambas3" for the development version.

Enjoy it !

How to compile and install Gambas for packaging it?

You must play with the prefix make variable when doing the installation.

You compile it normally:

$ cd gambas2-X.YY
$ ./configure
$ ./make

Then you install it in a location different from the root this way:

$ make prefix=~/myroot

Then you get all installed Gambas files, but inside your home directory, in the myroot sub-directory.