How to build GNOME Split

Introduction

For some reasons, it can be useful to build your own version of GNOME Split. You will probably be interested by this if you are a developer or if you are a packager for a GNU/Linux distribution. Here is a quick guide about the build and the installation of GNOME Split with the build scripts.

Getting the latest version

For now, there is no release of GNOME Split so you can only get the latest version of the Bazaar repository. First, you need to install  Bazaar. On an GNU/Linux distribution, you will probably use your package manager. For example:

sudo aptitude install bzr

Then, you will need the source code of GNOME Split, which can be downloaded with the bzr command.

bzr checkout bzr://www.respawner.fr/gnome-split/mainline gnome-split

Dependencies

GNOME Split uses some libraries like  java-gnome (>= 4.0.16) and  dbus-java (>= 2.5.1). So, you need to install these libraries on your system to be able to compile the source code and gettext to be able to extract the translation template. Like Bazaar, you can probably use the package manager to download and install the libraries.

sudo aptitude install libjava-gnome-java libdbus-java gettext

Be careful, the names of the packages may change from a distribution to another. Don't forget, because of GNOME Split is written in Java, you need a JDK (>= 1.6) to compile it and a JVM (>= 1.6) to run it.

Compile the source code

Now, you have the source code, the needed libraries, you just have to build the program. To do this, there is two important files in the code that you checkouted before. These files are named configure and Makefile.

First, you have to run the configure script (which is written in Perl) with the right paramaters. On an Ubuntu operating system, you have to use:

./configure prefix=/usr/ libdir=/usr/lib/jni/ jardir=/usr/share/java/

Where /usr/lib/jni/ is the directory where the JNI files are and /usr/share/java/ is the directory where the JAR files are.

After that, you can know use the Makefile by using the command :

make

Now, you can use GNOME Split by using the script named gnome-split in the current directory.

./gnome-split

But, it can be useful to install the program on your system to be able to start it by using the entry in the GNOME menu. To do this, just type the following command.

sudo make install

Now, enjoy GNOME Split just by calling the gnome-split binary or by clicking the new entry in the GNOME menu.