
Build Instructions -- Linux
---------------------------

The Linux tree should build easily assuming that you have all the tools
properly installed.  You'll need gcc, make, and all the tools which usually
accompany them.

You'll also need GTK version 1.1.15 or later.

Building the tree is a pretty simple process.  We use a "diving make" system,
where virtually every directory in the tree hierarchy has its own Makefile,
which contains the instructions for how to build the contents of that directory.

To get things started, just cd into the abi/src directory, and type 'make'.

There's a separate note on FONTS that you'll probably need to look at before
you can run AbiWord.  Remember this is a work-in-progress.  In the rare event that
your system does not have PNG and zlib development libraries installed, you will 
need to do this also. 


Build Instructions -- Windows NT
--------------------------------

Building on Windows NT is remarkably similar to building on Linux.  We
use the same set of Makefiles on Linux as well as NT.  You'll need to
get the CygWin32 tool set from Cygnus before you can build.  See
http://www.cygnus.com/misc/gnu-win32/ for information and downloads.
The file you need should be called cdk.exe on B19 and full.exe on B20.1,
and it's going to be around 14 megabytes.  Installing this stuff on your
NT machine will create an environment which looks remarkably like a UNIX
box.  You'll get a standard bash shell, GNU make, and all the standard UNIX
utilities like sed, awk, cp, ls, mv, and so on.  This environment is
the key which allows us to use the same set of Makefiles for both NT
and Linux.

Just in case you're wondering, yes, it should be possible to build
this tree with a subset of the tools.  There's 14 meg of stuff there,
and we don't *really* need all of it.  However, we haven't had time or
motivation to identify the specific set of apps we need.  Disk space
is cheap.  If you decide to make the effort to do so, please let us
know, and we'll share that information with other developers.

You also need Visual C++ 5.0.  Obviously, we don't use the IDE at all,
but we do use the compiler, headers, libraries, and so on.  You'll
need them all to be in your PATH, since the Makefiles will expect them
to be readily available.

Additionally, AbiWord uses the PNG and zlib libraries.  Both of these are 
available from our website, and are peers of the abi tree.  Once you 
have all this stuff downloaded, AbiWord should build just fine.  The
main AbiWord makefile will take care of building these other libraries.

Where is the executable?
------------------------

The AbiWord executable (AbiWord or AbiWord.exe) is created in
abi/src/wp/main/{unix,win}.  A copy of it is placed in
abi/dist/<PLATFORM>/bin.

<PLATFORM> is a placeholder for a name that will be automatically
generated by the make system.  This string is constructed of the
OS name, OS version, and machine architecture.  For example, on
my system, it is "Linux_2.0.33_i386_DBG".  (The _DBG suffix indicates
that it is a debug build.)

Where are the other generated files?
------------------------------------

The object files (.o or .obj) are placed in a <PLATFORM> subdirectory
under the directory containing the corresponding source file.

The library files (.a, .so, or .lib) are copied to abi/dist/<PLATFORM>/lib
to allow the loader to conviently find them.
