Frequently Asked Questions
General JHBuild Questions
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Q:
The wget command can't download any tarballs. How do I get it to work with my firewall?
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A:
Create ~/.wgetrc file. If an HTTP proxy is used to access FTP sites, add a line like the following to the file:
ftp_proxy = http://hostname:port/
If passive FTP connections are required (sometimes needed with NAT firewalls), add the following line:
passive_ftp = on
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Q:
Building is slow. Is there any way I can speed it up?
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A:
CCache can speed up compilations, as it caches compilation results. CCache is available with most distributions.
Set the cache size with the following command:
ccache -M 2G
(where 2G is the size the cache). Create symlinks to CCache for the compiler in ~/bin:
cd ~/bin for cmd in cc gcc c++ g++; do ln -s /usr/bin/ccache $cmd done
It is possible to check the status of the cache including cache hit rates with the following command:
ccache -s
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Q:
Is there a better way to monitor the status of the build than looking at terminal window?
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A:
If Zenity >= 2.9 is installed on your system, JHBuild will display an icon in the system tray. The icon will display the current build stage, and the tooltip will show the last message from JHBuild.
The icon will also pop up a balloon on error.
Building GNOME
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Q:
What other prerequisites are needed to build GNOME with JHBuild?
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A:
Some of the packages required include:
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DocBook XML DTD and XSLT stylesheets. These need to be registered in the XML catalog (/etc/xml/catalog).
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X libraries
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fam or gamin (used by gnome-vfs for file monitoring).
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libsmbclient from Samba (used for browsing Windows networks).
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libbz2 from bzip2.
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libpng, libjpeg and libtiff (used for image loading).
If installing distribution packages, and if applicable for your distribution, install the corresponding “dev” or “devel” packages. A list of package names for different distributions is maintained on the GNOME wiki.
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Q:
I built GNOME using JHBuild with prefix set to /usr, and now my system is broken. What should I do?
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A:
Don't set prefix to /usr.
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Q:
How do I get gnome-volume-manager to work when running JHBuild GNOME?
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A:
The gnome-volume-manager program reacts to messages from hald over the system message bus, which must be running as root. Assuming that your distribution comes with HAL, the main problem is getting gnome-volume-manager to talk to the system message bus.
As communication is over a UNIX domain socket, the easiest way is to create a symlink from /var/run/dbus to $prefix/var/run/dbus:
mkdir -p $prefix/var/run cd $prefix/var/run ln -s /var/run/dbus dbus
You may also have trouble building HAL with JHBuild, since it tries to install some things outside of its build root. Running make -k install in the hal directory might help here.