Installing from Source

You should only be building fldigi locally if the binary distribution does not work on your Linux distribution.  Unless you are modifying the code or need to compile for debugging you will not have any additional functionality over the binary files.  The source code for fldigi is very large and has a number of dependencies that must be satisfied before a successful compile.  If you are not familiar with compiling and linking source code you should probably practice on a simpler package before treading these waters.

To compile fldigi you will need:


You should also install the libraries and headers for PortAudio, the Portable audio I/O library.

Additional features are enabled if the corresponding libraries are present on your system:


Once you have installed the required packages, the following commands should be sufficient to compile fldigi and install it under /usr/local:

  ./configure
  make
  make install    (you may need superuser privileges for installation)

The `install' target installs the executable, an icon, and a .desktop file.  After installation, an fldigi launcher should appear somewhere in
your applications menu.

Use ./configure -help to see all of the possible compile configurable items that are available.  It is possible to compile fldigi for doing benchmark testing and for batch decoding.  This is obtained by configuring with the --enable-benchmark switch.  The binary is then suitable for measuring the modem's decoding speed.

Mac OS X installation notes

Mac OS X support was added in version 2.10.  To run fldigi on OS X, you will need to create an app bundle.  For this purpose, the Makefile has an `appbundle' target that can be used instead of `install':

  make appbundle

This target will generate two bundles inside the build directory (by default src/):

  1. mac-bundle/fldigi.app, which only contains the bare minimum that is required to run fldigi on the build system
  2. mac-libs-bundle/fldigi.app, which also includes copies of non-system libraries (such as PortAudio and FLTK) that the binary links to

The configure script has some support for building universal x86/ppc binaries.  Pass the following additional arguments to enable it:

  --enable-mac-universal --disable-dependency-tracking

Fldigi has not been well tested on OS X. Any feedback, suggestions, or patches will be very welcome.

Windows installation notes

As of version 3.0, fldigi supports win32 systems via the Cygwin POSIX environment.  To install cygwin, use the following installer link:

  http://www.cygwin.com/setup.exe

Refer to the list of library requirements and install the corresponding cygwin packages.  You will need at least the following:

  1. Base:     (all base packages)
  2. Devel:    binutils boost-devel fltk-devel gcc-g++ make pkg-config
  3. Graphics: libjpeg-devel libpng12-devel
  4. Libs:     zlib

Use the default "Curr" option for the package selection.

PortAudio and libsamplerate are not available from Cygwin and must be compiled from source.  If you wish to build easily redistributable binaries, configure these libraries for static linking, e.g. with

`--enable-static --disable-shared'.

After you have installed them in the desired location, remember to tell `pkg-config' how to find them, e.g. with

  export PKG_SEARCH_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

To configure fldigi itself for static linking, use the following command:

  ./configure --enable-static LDFLAGS=-static

This will produce a binary that only depends on the cygwin library, which can be found in /bin/cygwin1.dll.

At the time of writing, fldigi has been built with the latest release of Cygwin, version 1.5.25.  The binary runs on Windows 2000 and XP, however, a newer version of the cygwin1.dll library may be required for Vista.  Version 20080530 of the 1.7 pre-release snapshot has been tested and is known to work:

  http://cygwin.com/snapshots/

Free Software Foundation Generic Installation Instructions.

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