GUI programming with GTk+

it was a long time ago that i had tried a simple hello world program from 'Beggining' Linux programming and failed badly , going by the difficulty i had in figuring out the flags to be given to gcc and and the directories and libs i had to explicitly include, but i hvae atlast found some success, well it is not a achievement as all i did was follow the same book and do what it said , but i feel relieved , it has been my dream to develop a GUI based software for managing 'small business' . Which can be easily configured and used for any sort of 'small ' range business, as all of them have the same basic backdrop. So finally i have started working with GtkObjects and GtkWidgets, so it should not be long before i am grinding out some really good stuff !!!
Everytime we compile a program using the Gtk+ packages, we have to include some metadata about the include directories containing the headers, the directories to find the libraries in and all such stuff, it is quite difficult to figure these out individually, and that was the problem i faced initially. The book gives a solution , it uses the command 'pkg-config -cflags -libs gtk+-2.0' to give the details of the cflags and the libraries ! So for compiling a program named 'helloworld.c' i would give the following command according to the book, :
# gcc helloworld.c -o helloworld `pkg-config -cflags -libs gtk+-2.0`
note the reverse quotes they substitute the ouput of pkg-config command , but THAT DOES NOT WORK, the man page for pkg-config shows that the options to be given to it are ' --cflags --libs' , i am not sure whether this has changed since the time the book was written , but what is given in the book doesn't work with me , so the correct thing would now be :
# gcc helloworld.c -o helloworld `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0`
that compiles and gives the output !!
pkg-config is a utility for displaying the meta-data for packages which are installed on the system , check out the man pages for more detailed info !!

Comments

Dipen Chaudhary said…
hmmm interesting blog, hmmmm how about doing this business application with LUG ?
also check ur e mail and LUG site ..
March 23, 2008 at 6:39 AM
uma said…
good observation, I think thats a print mistake, its a customary to append '--' to the options or '-' to the options short letter.
I mean either '--install' or '-i'.

In addition, if you are using pkg-config utility, the package should reside in the exported PKG_CONFIG_PATH directory. Usually it would reside in wither '/usr/lib/pkgconfig' or '/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig' as 'packagename.pc'

The package name provided to the pkg-config utility is before the suffix '.pc'.


Alternatively u could achieve the same using: '-I' and 'l' options.
March 31, 2008 at 10:46 AM
Satish said…
well, ya when i got hooked up with pkg-config i tried to figure out how it works, and eventually from some trials and the man pages found out what u have mentioned, though i should mention , it is a very interesting utiltiy , and i have one small doubt , is it a general utility or a package specific, like is pkg-config provided only with gnome , and only with QT or something like that ???
March 31, 2008 at 5:20 PM
uma said…
@satish,
Its a general utility. I didnt get what u mean by package specific. If u mean to say ,whether it is a desktop specific, then its no, its from freedesktop.org, so the utility can be used by any desktop.

The common usage is while compiling, to help the auto-tools like automake, autoconf, irrespective of the gnome or kde desktops.
April 1, 2008 at 10:55 AM
Satish said…
ya i got it , yea actually my question was whether it was specific to a software , but ya a litlle googling tells that it is not , .....
thanks
April 1, 2008 at 9:25 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Was history ! :)

This blog represents a part of my undergraduate life when I was extremely active. The blog contains about 59 posts and excluding the previous one all the others were written in a span of 6 months ranging from Jan 2008 - June 2008. Which just tells how active I was in those days, and these were times when the Wi-Fi at campus was still in the planning phase and I was using internet over my GPRS enabled ancient Nokia 7610 (using wvdial + rfcomm over bluetooth). So it used to take like 10 minutes to update a post once written. But still never after that period have I written so much. Feels good to think about the intense work I did during the second year which looks simple now, but played an integral role in making me what I am today (if I am something !) !.
Read more

beginning again

Its been some time since I stopped writing here because I had my own site running drupal at http://satish.playdrupal.com, but today something happened which will work to change my life in the coming years. Whether for the good or bad, things after today will be in a new chapter in my life ,and as a resolution I have decided this blog and write stuff onto its pages, so those of you who have visited this blog and left in disappointment may not need to do so anymore. I will follow this post with a series of posts on using Linux for the common user.
Read more

Kernel installer !

i have been learning gui programming with Ruby, .. it is a lot more easier designing GUI's with languages like Ruby or Python , than C . I actually wanted to write a kernel installer , which would work like this , .... nothing related to the kernel is involved in the functioning of the installer , here is how it would go step by step .... : ask for the kernel archive file .(or may be just ask for the patch file and do the rest as same after applying the patch ). process the available config techniques based on the presence of libraries (like make gconfig, make menuconfig , make xconfig, ... etc) ask the user to choose the config technique give the option for the user to load the .config file from the installed kernel and then compile the kernel , the progress being shown in a display window and then complete the installation and ask the user to reboot to use the new kernel i just got this idea, .... does a tool like this already exist, ... or would it be worth it , to develop so
Read more