Building GTK+ 3 Library

I have spent my days building GTK+ 3 and components for my project inside my Thinkpad E125 running on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx).

Below are GTK+ 3 components that need to be downloaded from their respective project site:

• GTK+, Glib, Pango, Atk, gdk-pixbuf, gtk-doc - http://gnome.org 
• Cairo - http://cairographic.org 
• FreeType, Fontconfig, HARFBUZZ - http://freedesktop.org

Installation directory is under /opt/gtk, pkg-config ($PKG_CONFIG_PATH), dynamic library ($LD_LIBRARY_PATH) and system path ($PATH) environment variable should be determined (depends on package) in order to configure and compile each package. Notice that I passed extraction process for each package and cover only build and installation.

Also it is important to have a correct version for package dependency, for example GTK+ 3.6.4 requires at least version 2.34.x of Glib, as well as other package. gtk-doc is optional (enabled with --enable-gtk-doc configure argument) to generate GTK+ HTML style documentation which very important to me.

So here are the building steps:

• gtk-doc-1.18
  $ ./configure && make && sudo make install
• glib-2.34.3
  $ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk --enable-gtk-doc
  $ make && sudo make install
• atk-2.6.0
  $ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib/pkgconfig LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk --enable-gtk-doc
  $ make && sudo make install
• at-spi2-core-2.6.3
  $ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib/pkgconfig LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk
  $ make && sudo make install
• at-spi2-atk-2.6.2
  $ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib/pkgconfig LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk
  $ PATH=/opt/gtk/bin:$PATH make
  $ sudo PATH=$PATH:/opt/gtk/bin make install
• pixman-0.28.2
  $ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk
  $ make && sudo make install
• cairo-1.2.14
  $ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib/pkgconfig ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk --enable-gtk-doc
  $ make && sudo make install
• gdk-pixbuf-2.29.0
  $ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib/pkgconfig LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk --enable-gtk-doc --without-libtiff
  $ make && sudo make install
• freetype-2.4.11
  $ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk
  $ make && sudo make install
• fontconfig-2.10.91
  $ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk
  $ make && sudo make install
• harfbuzz-0.9.16
  $ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk
  $ make && sudo make install
• pango-1.32.5
  $ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib/pkgconfig ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk --enable-gtk-doc
  $ make && sudo make install
• gtk+-3.6.4
  $ PATH=/opt/gtk/bin:$PATH PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib/pkgconfig LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk --enable-gtk-doc --enable-packagekit=no
  $ PATH=/opt/gtk/bin:$PATH make
  $ PATH=/opt/gtk/bin:$PATH sudo make install

To test if the build was successful, the easy way is to run gtk3-demo program inside /opt/gtk/bin, previously have provided dynamic module path either in ld.so.conf or by set LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable at the runtime, for example:

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gtk/lib /opt/gtk/bin/gtk3-demo

To compile and link against GTK+ 3 (or any component), use pkg-config environment variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH to set GTK+ 3 pkg-config file location for both --cflags and --libs argument.