First make sure that you have the necessary external dependencies
installed: pkg-config
, Meson, Ninja, the JPEG,
PNG, and TIFF libraries, FreeType, and, if necessary, libiconv and
libintl. To get detailed information about building these
packages, see the documentation provided with the individual
packages. On any average Linux system, it’s quite likely you’ll
have all of these installed already, or they will be easily
accessible through your operating system package repositories.
Then build and install the GTK libraries in the order: GLib,
Cairo, Pango, then GTK. For each library, follow the instructions
they provide, and make sure to share common settings between them
and the GTK build; if you are using a separate prefix for GTK, for
instance, you will need to use the same prefix for all its
dependencies you build. If you’re lucky, this will all go
smoothly, and you’ll be ready to
gtk4-demo
program that GTK installs.
If one of the projects you’re configuring or building fails, look closely at the error messages printed; these will often provide useful information as to what went wrong. Every build system has its own log that can help you understand the issue you’re encountering. If all else fails, you can ask for help on the GTK forums.