This section gives you some advice on how to work with this project: what tools to use, how to prepare patches and so on. Most of these guidelines are not obligatory, but usually provide the best way to work with the project. If you have other or better ways to get things done, in particular if you use different tools, then you should just carry on using them as long as the results are usable.
G System development can best be done on POSIX compliant operating systems. This usually means to use some kind of Unix, like Linux, FreeBSD or NetBSD which are all freely available. All of the tools used are available on these systems. Still, the source code itself is not platform specific and can be compiled on any operating system supported by Qt and KDE.
MAC OS X is based on FreeBSD and thus also provides a suitable environment for G System development, although none of the current developers uses it. This means you might encounter some initial troubles with this operating system. Nevertheless, if you are using a MAC and can work out the initial issues we would be grateful to add MAC OS X to our list of possible development platforms.
Windows is a very difficult development platform, as it is not standards compliant. Still, you might at least get the source code to compile with gcc and Qt for Windows. The Borland C++ compiler might work as well, but probably has some issues. Building the documentation or doing any reasonable development on Windows is probably difficult, likely more difficult than on MAC OS X. If you get some setup to work please let us know.
You might already have a suitable platform installed for G System development. If not then you should get and install one of the following platforms, whichever suits you best.
It is very important to note that the only difference in the listed operating systems is the base system. Basically all of these systems provide the same set of software, like KDE. So it is a matter of taste what you prefer to install, you will have all required tools available on all the listed operating systems.
All of theses systems are not just available on Intel x86 hardware, but also on x86_64 (AMD64), PPC (MAC), Sparc and many more. NetBSD is available on over 50 such platforms! So if you have exotic hardware you will still be able to run these systems.
Linux
If you want to install Linux you can choose between various distributions, that provide a full Linux based operating system which usually includes all required tools for G System development out-of-the-box.
Linux Distributions:
OpenSuse: http://www.opensuse.org
Kubuntu: http://www.kubuntu.org
Fedora: http://fedora.redhat.com
Mandriva: http://www.mandriva.org
Debian: http://www.debian.org
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a full operating system in itself, and probably the most complete available anywhere. Together with NetBSD and OpenBSD it is derived from the original BSD code (Berkeley Software Distribution). You should have some basic knowledge of Unix if you want to use FreeBSD.
You can find FreeBSD in the internet at http://www.freebsd.org.
NetBSD
NetBSD, like FreeBSD, is a full operating system in itself, but more lean and mean. You should have some basic knowledge of Unix if you want to use NetBSD.
You can find NetBSD in the internet at http://www.netbsd.org.
All these operating systems come with a large number of libraries and application that can be installed right away. If one of the required libraries or tools are not included with the installation CDs of the operating system, you might need to download and install them yourself.
You should make sure that you have the following libraries installed:
Qt SQLite database plugin (or any other supported DB plugin)
You should make sure that you have the following tools and applications installed:
graphviz (used by doxygen)
docbook-xml
docbook-xsl
htmldoc
xsltproc (libxslt)