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michael
Asked: 2012-11-07 15:37:13 +0800 CST

What libraries do I need to install if I want to compile Emacs?

  • 772

I am trying to compile emacs on Ubuntu 12.04. This is because I want to use Emacs 24.2.

However, I am getting the following error. How can I fix it?

checking for long file names... yes
checking for X... no
checking for X... true
configure: error: You seem to be running X, but no X development libraries
were found.  You should install the relevant development files for X
and for the toolkit you want, such as Gtk+, Lesstif or Motif.  Also make
sure you have development files for image handling, i.e.
tiff, gif, jpeg, png and xpm.
If you are sure you want Emacs compiled without X window support, pass
  --without-x
to configure.
emacs

2 Answers

  1. I used to do it this way:

    sudo apt-get install build-essential texinfo libx11-dev libxpm-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libgif-dev libtiff-dev libgtk-3-dev libncurses-dev libgnutls28-dev
# for gtk2 build replace libgtk-3-dev with libgtk2.0-dev

git clone --depth=1 git://git.savannah.gnu.org/emacs.git
cd emacs
./autogen.sh # not needed when installing from tarball
./configure
make bootstrap
sudo make install

    To build docs:

    make docs
# or build just the format you want:
make info
make dvi
make html
make pdf

    But now I just use the package 

    sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ubuntu-elisp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot
    • 30

  2. If you run

    sudo apt-get build-dep emacs23

    that installs everything that is needed to compile the emacs23 package. Quite likely that's enough to compile Emacs 24.2, too.

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