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# Installation

## Download :

Visit the github project page to download snapshots. For a stable version use the latest numerical tag. If you are using an old LTS distro with a GTK3 version lower than 3.20 you should use roxterm 3.3.1, preferably from your distro's package manager. In case your distro is really old, roxterm 2.x supports GTK2.

## Requirements :

You need the libraries for GTK+3 which is pretty much standard on all free Unix derivatives these days. It needs at least version 2.16 of glib and GTK+ 3.20. You will also need vte/libvte (at least version 0.48 of vte-2.91), a GNOME component. D-BUS is also required (see below).

To compile ROXTerm you will need the header files for the above libraries. In packaging systems they usually come in packages whose names end in "-dev" or "-devel".

Prior to 3.5.0 ROXTerm used a bespoke build system called maitch. This requires python and the python 'lockfile' module. 3.5.0 uses the more conventional CMake.

### D-Bus

D-Bus is a messaging system which ROXTerm uses to connect terminals with its configure tool. ROXTerm uses the "session" bus, which should be started along with your desktop environment. Current versions of ROX, GNOME and KDE/Plasma session managers all launch D-Bus. If you use some other session/desktop/window manager which doesn't launch D-Bus you can start it by inserting something like this near the start of your .xinitrc or .xsession:

if test -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ; then eval `dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session` export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS fi

The reason for using a bespoke configuration messaging system over D-Bus instead of gconf is because gconf doesn't provide a way to map an arbitrary number of profiles onto configuration filenames.

## Installing :

To install ROXTerm for ROX all you need to do is check it out or unpack it into your Apps directory and run it from there, but you will probably want to rename the folder to ROXTerm. For other systems ROXTerm may be installed in the typical CMake way:

mkdir build cd build cmake .. make -j 4 sudo make install

The `-j 4` is optional, to accelerate the build by using multiple processing threads. Replace the 4 with the number of "threads" or cores your CPU has.

Various other options are available, run

cmake --help

for details.

### Debian & Ubuntu

Up-to-date official Debian packages are not currently available, but packages from the Ubuntu PPA may be compatible, or you can take advantage of the debian build files provided.

You can use `sudo apt-get build-dep roxterm` at this point, but depending on the version already in your distro the set of packages may be out-of-date, so be prepared for dependency errors later and install the necessary packages at that point.

If not using a release snapshot it's a good idead to use `dch` to ensure the newest version number in `debian/changelog` has an appropriate version number eg what `./version.sh` generates in the file `version`, based on the output of `git describe`. Now you can build the packages eg with `debuild -b -uc -us`. Note the `-b`:- only binary packages can be built in the absence of an orig tarball.