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Compiling Aqualung

Here's how to do it. It can be tough, but if you follow the instructions it shouldn't be a big problem. However, if you have never built packages from source before, this is probably not the time to learn. Aqualung depends on quite a few libraries and installing them the right way before attempting to compile Aqualung is an earnest of success.

This dependency graph shows the software needed to compile Aqualung. Green packages are not necessarily needed (read more about them below) and the pthread library is normally part of your libc, so you should not need to install it by hand. You should not install GTK+ by hand either, as it needs lots of packages and is fairly complicated to build from source. And every distro has packages for it, so why bother. Everything else is quite easy, as you will see.

Aqualung uses the GNU autotools (autoconf, automake, autoheader) and relies on pkg-config to gain information about your system and installed libraries needed to setup a working build environment. So, it is the usual ./configure, make, make install stuff, with a few specialized points.

Part of Aqualung's functionality is optionally built. That means you can build Aqualung without certain features if you don't need them, and in such cases you won't need the libraries supporting that particular functionality either. When running ./configure, the script will detect the libraries present on the system and try to adapt the configuration accordingly (this works in the case when only optional libraries are absent; the absence of mandatory libs will cause hard errors in any case).

You only need to pass the following options to ./configure if you want to turn something off that would otherwise be automatically detected and compiled in, or turn something on to make sure that the absence of the corresponding optional library causes a hard error and doesn't get through unnoticed. Upon successful completion of the configure step, the configuration is printed in tabular form. You can also access this info later by looking in the About box or typing aqualung --version.

So let's see what options we have when configuring. Everything is on (enabled, built) by default, so only the option to turn it off is showed. In that case, the library in brackets is not needed. To get a list of all the valid configuration options, type ./configure --help.

Miscellaneous configuration options (normally not needed):

You can also use the option --with-foo=no instead of --without-foo. Autoconf is a clever thing.

Note that you can turn off any and all input format support libraries -- naturally, you should not turn them off at once, or the program will be completely useless.

Also note that JACK is not optional. This is because Aqualung uses the lock-free ringbuffer implementation provided by the JACK support library for data transfer between threads. Hint: if you don't need JACK output, you don't need to build a working JACK on your computer. All you have to achieve is the ability to link to libjack, which should be satisfied even with a dumbed-down JACK build (disable all real output drivers in JACK's ./configure, and build only the dummy output driver). (One day we might provide our own lock-free ringbuffer implementation, so JACK won't be needed in all cases.)

Installing

make install will put the executable, the manpage, the icons, the four supported skins (dark, default, metal, woody) and the HTML documentation in the right places. What the right places are depends on your system, and can be set manually by using standard ./configure options, most notably --prefix. If you are not familiar with this, ./configure --help is your friend.