Building appleseed on Linux FAQ

This page intent to gather informations / problems you could encounter while you try to compile and use appleseed on your custom Linux.

Notes

There is multiples CMake options to compile appleseed on Linux.

Roughly:

• You can choose to use internal libraries appleseed is shipped with (available in the appleseed-deps repository)
• You can choose to use your system's libraries.

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

The second case should also work 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 llvm-gcc 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 specially the case on Linux platform.

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

Put to ON every USE_EXTERNAL_(LIBNAME). Ensure you have the libraries available on your system.

Do I really need CMake 2.8.12 to compile? I only have 2.8.7 shipped with my system. (2014/02/17)

The current Ubuntu LTS (12.04) is shipped with CMake 2.8.7. Appleseed requiere CMake 2.8.12 mainly for Python check stuff. You should be able to compile it disabling WITH_PYTHON CMake flag.

Of course, you will not have appleseed.python.

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 disabling WITH_ALEMBIC CMake flag.

I have weird messages when I run appleseed.studio.

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. Remove the qt-at-spi package solve the problem.

I still have problems trying to compile appleseed on my distro.

If you still have problems trying to compile appleseed, the best place to get support is the google group.

Give as much informations as you can. This include:

• The distro name.
• The gcc version you are using (gcc --version).
• CMake flags you have enabled/disabled.
• What you do when it crash.
• And of course, the error message.