Building appleseed on Linux FAQ

This page answers some of the questions you might have when building appleseed on Linux.

Notes

There are two ways to build appleseed on Linux:

• You can use the third party libraries that ship with appleseed (available in the appleseed-deps repository)
• You can use the libraries from your system.

The first case is supposed to work on every Linux system as we freeze dependency versions to limit possible incompatibilities and problems. The downside of this is that you will have to compile each dependency yourself.

The second case is the prefered method but you could encounter specific problems related to your configuration.

appleseed builds cleanly (zero error, zero warning) on all platforms we support (64-bit Windows with VS 2012 or VS 2013; 64-bit linux with gcc 4.5+; 64-bit OS X with clang 3+), and we always fix any error or warning that gets reported for platforms we don't officially support.

C++ is almost surely the largest and most complex programming language ever devised. It's pretty well known that no existing C++ compiler supports the whole language: each compiler supports a slightly, subtly different subset of C++. That means that each time someone is trying to build appleseed on a platform / compiler / compiler version combo that we never used ourselves, he or she will probably hit a handful of new warnings or errors. This is the case on Linux just like on any other platform.

How to use every possible libraries available on my system? (2014/02/17)

Set every USE_EXTERNAL_(LIBNAME) CMake option to ON. Make sure the libraries are available on your system.

Do I really need CMake 2.8.12? My system only ships with CMake 2.8.7. (2014/02/17)

The current Ubuntu LTS (12.04) ships with CMake 2.8.7. appleseed requires CMake 2.8.12 mainly for building the Python bindings. You should be able to use CMake 2.8.7 if you disable the Python bindings by setting the WITH_PYTHON CMake option to OFF.

Can I build appleseed without Alembic support? (2014/02/17)

Alembic is not easy to compile from scratch and is not shipped with most Linux distro. If you don't need it, you can skip it by setting WITH_ALEMBIC to OFF.

I have weird messages when I run appleseed.studio. (2014/02/17)

If you have this kind of messages when you run appleseed.studio:

Got bus address:  "unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-1lVDjtDkEZ,guid=b71f94bf3f1e0feca84bc25d0000077f"
Connected to accessibility bus at:  "unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-1lVDjtDkEZ,guid=b71f94bf3f1e0feca84bc25d0000077f"
Registered DEC:  true
Registered event listener change listener:  true
...

This is a bug in qt-at-spi. Removing the qt-at-spi package should solve the problem.

I still have troubles compiling appleseed on my distro. (2014/02/17)

The best place to get support is the appleseed-dev mailing list.

Please provide us with as much information as you can, in particular:

• the name and version of your Linux distro;
• the name and version of your compiler (with gcc: gcc --version);
• CMake flags you have enabled/disabled;
• if appleseed doesn't compile, the first few error messages;
• if appleseed crashes, the sequence of actions that led to the crash.