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2. Installation

2.1 How to obtain Scribus

You can get the most recent version of Scribus from the Scribus home page at:

http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid

2.2 Requirements

In order to compile and use Scribus you need:

  1. Qt-3.0.3 or higher - both the runtime libraries and development libraries. For versions 0.6 and earlier, 2.2.2 or higher are supported and the Qt 3 libraries are not supported. All the 2.3.x versions have been tested and work well. 2.3.2 is the latest version from Trolltech. For versions earlier than 0.7, Qt 2.3.1 is recommended and has been the most trouble free.

  2. Ghostscript > 5.50 or greater. GNU Ghostscript 7.05 or AFPL Ghostscript 8.0 is highly recommended, especially for PDF/X-3 creation. Note: on Red Hat 7.1& 7.2, Ghostscript 7.0x will cause problems with your existing Lprng / printconf-gui setup. Use the latest rpms from Red Hat or replace with CUPS.

  3. Postscript-Fonts. True Type Fonts have been supported since v. 0.4.7.

  4. Scribus will run under most any window manager and does not require KDE itself. However, some drop and drag functionality will be lost without KDE. The author of this documentation has made a point of testing each release of Scribus, however briefly,under Gnome 1.4 and Gnome 2.x. This has shown no incompatibilities or problems for Scribus, except for the loss of drop and drag functionality.

  5. If color management does not work, you may not have installed the development libraries for littlecms. When downloading the package from littlecms the make files are already configured for Linux,so compiling is straight forward. On Red Hat 7.2, 7.3 or 8.0 you may have to type export LDFLAGS="-lm", just before compiling or littlecms may not link correctly to Scribus.

  6. Recent development versions since 0.7.7 have sucessfully compiled with gcc 3.1 and 3.2 and Qt 3.0.5 and QT 3.1. A bug in QT 3.1, has caused the program author to not recommend using Scribus with QT 3.1 yet. Testing suggests setting the correct "-march=" CXXFLAGS has a very benefitial effect on Scribus performance. Ex. export CXXFLAGS="-march=athlon"

Optionally:

2.3 Compilation and Installation

If you have never compiled programs before, this article: Compiling Scribus for the First Time has detailed instructions for setting up your workstation to compiling Scribus from the source.

In order to compile and install Scribus on your system, type the following in the base directory of the Scribus distribution after uncompressing the downloaded package:

% ./configure    
% make  
% make install (as root)

The executable for the program is located in /usr/local/bin. Documentation is located in usr/local/share/scribus/doc

In addition, there is a desktop.config named desktop.scribus which can be used for a menu shortcut or desktop shortcut. Simply copy this from the base directory of the installation source directory to your KDE desktop and this will launch Scribus. After dragging this to the desktop, right click and make sure the execute check box is checked.

Since Scribus uses autoconf, you should little difficulty compiling it. Should you run into problems please report them to the the author at franz.schmid@altmuehlnet.de

2.4 Platforms

Although developed primarily for Linux, the author is aware of ports for Scribus on FreeBSD, NetBSD and most recently Fink (GPL applications running on OSX with Xfree86). In addition, the author has successfully complied and run earlier versions of Scribus under Solaris/Intel 8 using Openwin. Scribus has very little platform dependent code, except for Xlibs. News of other successful ports would be welcome. For fun, see:Scribus on Windows 2000 and Cygwin

Scribus is currently included or packaged for the following distributions:


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