Building

Get the latest sources from Subversion and examine the README.svn file for notes on compiling gnucash, and the HACKING file for notes on hacking the code.

Here are the basic steps one might end up taking:

1. change to gnucash directory

 cd gnucash

2. generate the configure script

 ./autogen.sh 

3. look at configure options

 ./configure --help

4. run configure

 ./configure --prefix=/opt/gnucash \
    --enable-debug --enable-doxygen \
    --enable-error-on-warning --enable-compile-warnings \
    [--enable-ofx [...]]

5. compile and install

 make
 make install

6. run

 /opt/gnucash/bin/gnucash

Required Packages

See the README.dependencies file for library dependency notes.

Debian

On Debian, the packages you'll probably need are (among many others):

swig
libgnomeui-dev
libofx-dev
libgsf-1-dev
libgtkhtml3.2-dev (3.6 or 3.8 will also do)
libgwrapguile-dev OR
guile-g-wrap

If you see the error "<unnamed port>: no code for module (g-wrap gw standard)" at runtime, see this particular FAQ.

Ubuntu Breezy Badger

Please see the BreezyBadgerInstallation page for more information on installing a beta snapshot of GnuCash on Breezy Badger.

Gentoo

Gentoo instructions can be found on Gnucash-svn installation on Gentoo.

Mac OS X

Mac OS X instructions can be found on gnucash installation from source on Mac OS X.

Fedora Core 5

At least the following packages are required to build GnuCash from source on FC5:

libtool-ltdl-devel
guile-devel
g-wrap-devel
libgnomeprint22-devel
libgnomeprintui22-devel
gtkhtml3-devel

Suggested way to satify all requirements:

# yum install libtool-ltdl-devel guile-devel g-wrap-devel libgnomeprint22-devel libgnomeprintui22-devel gtkhtml3-devel

Please note that while the configure script only checks for GtkHTML up to 3.8, recent versions of GtkHTML ship with "libgtkhtml-3.8.pc" so yes, you CAN use gtkhtml3-3.10 on FC5.

Dapper Flight 7

On an fresh install of Ubuntu/Dapper, do the following to be able to compile trunk gnucash:

sudo apt-get install libguile-dev libgwrapguile-dev guile-www

There are possibly other dependencies (that I already had installed), but this should get you started.

The below was ok for Flight 5

sudo apt-get install libgnomeui-dev libofx-dev libgsf-1-dev \
libgtkhtml3.8-dev guile-g-wrap libltdl3-dev g-wrap doxygen \
libgsf-gnome-1-dev automake1.9 texinfo build-essential intltool \
libtool subversion libfinance-quote-perl

For straight Dapper, I needed:

sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev intltool automake1.9 autoconf libtool

Create development tree

mkdir -p $HOME/development/gnucash
mkdir -p $HOME/unstable/gnucash

Check out gnucash trunk

cd $HOME/development/gnucash
svn checkout http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/trunk gnucash

Compile gnucash

cd gnucash
./autogen.sh

./configure --prefix=$HOME/unstable/gnucash \
   --enable-debug --enable-doxygen \
   --enable-error-on-warning --enable-compile-warnings

make all install

Start newly compiled gnucash

cd $HOME/unstable/gnucash/bin
./gnucash