OpenCPN

Compiling on Linux

Documented platforms

The documentation here covers Debian/Ubuntu and Flatpak. Debian .deb packages and Flatpaks are the primary deployment platforms for Linux. It is certainly possible to compile OpenCPN on other Linux distributions by adapting these instructions.

The instructions are based on the files in the ci/ directory, at the time of writing ci/generic_build_debian.sh and ci/generic_build_flatpak.sh. These files which are continously tested is the ultimate source for how to build on Linux.

Debian/Ubuntu

1. Download source code

$ git clone git://github.com/OpenCPN/OpenCPN.git
$ cd OpenCPN

2. Install build dependencies

$ sudo apt install devscripts equivs
$ sudo mk-build-deps -i -r ci/control
$ sudo apt-get --allow-unauthenticated install -f

Notes:

  • On old systems like Debian Buster and Ubuntu Bionic it is possible to build OpenCPN linked against gtk2 or gtk3. The default alternative is to use gtk3.

  • The build setup is generally updated for Debian and Ubuntu LTS releases.

3. Optional: Remove old installation

$ sudo apt-get remove opencpn

4. Build it

We’ll build everything in a subdirectory to keep the codebase clean (easier to catch changes).

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make

Notes:

Default install dir is /usr/local, this can be changed by providing the appropriate option to cmake:

$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..

cmake is only required when building source code for the first time, then running make is enough even if the source code is updated.

5. Install it or create a package

$ sudo make install

Or, to create a .deb package:

$ make package

Flatpak

1. Install flatpak

Install flatpak and flatpak-builder as described in https://flatpak.org/setup/.

2. Install runtime and SDK

At the time of writing version 22.08 is used. Check flatpak/org.opencpn.OpenCPN.yaml for the version actually used, look for runtime-version:. Install the proper runtime and Sdk, for example:

$ sudo flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Platform//22.08
$ sudo flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Sdk//22.08

3. Build and install:

$ cd build
$ make -f ../flatpak/Makefile build

The makefile will build the flatpak version and also install it.

4. Run

$ flatpak run org.opencpn.OpenCPN

5. Debugging

The flatpak’ed OpenCPN runs in a sandbox, so specialized debugging techniques must be applied. See The flatpak site

Compiling for Raspberry Pi (RPi)

From RPi 4 the board has resources enough to run a native build, which is performed according to the instructions for Debian.

For RPi 3 with 1GB of ram builds are usually done utilizing cross-compiling on Linux, often using docker and, for 32-bit armhf builds, also qemu. A description of these builds is out of scope for this document.

Fedora

To install the dependencies required to build OpenCPN from source on Fedora (Tested on 38), run the following command:

sudo dnf install wxGTK-devel cmake gcc-c++ git glew-devel openssl-devel \
libcurl-devel libarchive-devel elfutils-libelf-devel redhat-lsb-core \
libusb1-devel tinyxml-devel systemd-devel portaudio-devel libsndfile-devel \
gtest-devel sqlite-devel rapidjson-devel

Then use whichever build method you prefer.

IDEs

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code provides very decent support for C development. Install the language support for C, cmake and Git and open the root folder of the OpenCPN source tree.

Eclipse

The current version has native support for cmake projects. It is thus possible to just create a new CMake project based on current sources out of the box. There is thus no need to use the unmaintained cmake -G "Eclipse CDT4 - Unix Makefiles" ../ cmake project generation.

However, this version suffers from https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=400073 which makes it impossible to index the sources. Without indexing, eclipse does not add that much value.

KDevelop

Current version 5.6.2 has native support for CMake project. There is thus no need to use the unmaintained cmake -G "KDevelop3 - Unix Makefiles" ../ cmake project generation tools.

CLion

The CLion IDE is currently used by some of the core project developers with good results.

CLion is commercial software, but are giving out free licenses for open source development in certain cases.

wxFormBuilder

Initially, many of the dialogs was developed using wxFormBuilder. However, the sources has since long been patched "manually" and it is not possible to maintain them using this tool which basically has been abandoned in the project.

Running inside an IDE

In order to be able to run OpenCPN from inside the IDE installed data needs to be copied to the build/ folder according to

$ cd build
$ for d in gshhs s57data tcdata; do; cp -ar ../data/$d .; done
$ mkdir uidata
$ cp ../src/bitmaps/*.xml ../src/bitmaps/*.png ../src/bitmaps/*.svg uidata
$ cp ../data/authors.html ../data/license.html .

opencpn should be run with the -p options which sets it into 'portable' mode and therefore looks in the location the 'opencpn' executable is run from, i.e. the 'build' directory.

Creating a working IDE setup is somewhat complex, and the details varies between different IDEs.