Downloading GNU Smalltalk
Source code for GNU Smalltalk releases may be downloaded from any of the GNU mirror sites:
- the GNU Smalltalk FTP site contains the latest stable version and previous versions.
- the Alpha GNU Smalltalk FTP site contains the latest unstable (beta or release-candidate) version.
The latest source code for GNU Smalltalk (for both the stable and development branches) is accessible also through CVS and Git repositories.
Prerequisites
The following table details the prerequisites for building GNU Smalltalk successfully.
| GCC 4.2 or later | required to build GNU Smalltalk successfully. | |
InfoZIP (zip), pkg-config |
required to build GNU Smalltalk successfully. | |
libsigsegv, libffi, libltdl |
recommended; if these are not present in the system, GNU Smalltalk will use a copy that is bundled in its source code distribution. These packages will become required in the future. | |
readline |
optional; if missing, GNU Smalltalk's terminal interface will lack history and editing functionality. | |
| GMP | optional; if missing, large integer operations will be noticeably slower. | |
libiconv(non-glibc systems only) |
optional; if missing, GNU Smalltalk will lack support for multibyte character sets. Many GNU Smalltalk packages (including Seaside and Iliad) require this support. | |
| GnuTLS | optional; if missing, GNU Smalltalk will not be able to download packages hosted on servers using the HTTPS protocol (including GitHub). | |
| Cairo, GTK+ | optional; if missing, you will not be able to run GNU Smalltalk's graphical user interface, VisualGST. | |
| other packages (SDL, SQLite) | optional; if missing, the corresponding library bindings will not be built. | |
All of these packages are commonly available in most GNU/Linux distributions as well as collections of packages for Darwin (Fink, MacPorts). On most distributions, development packages containing header files have to be installed separately; they are needed when building GNU Smalltalk from source.
On some platforms, GNU awk (gawk) may also be required as the system implementation of awk may be insufficient.
Building
After downloading the source code release and ensuring the presence of the above prerequisite packages, you will need to issue the following commands:
./configure make make check make install
For more information on the options to configure, see the relevant documentation.
configure's output will contain detailed information on which GNU Smalltalk packages will not be installed due to missing prerequisite packages.
Binary distributions
We do not provide pre-compiled binaries for GNU Smalltalk. However, most GNU/Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora) include packages for GNU Smalltalk.