This is the short installation description. Consult the other chapters if you are in doubt.

Bluefish is installed using the standard 'configure, make, make install' steps. Assuming you have downloaded a bluefish source package, for instance bluefish-ver.tar.gz (naturally, change the filename to what's appropriate), you complete the installation with the following steps:

The configure script is used to automatically find the appropriate settings for your system. Because of differences between systems, this compile-time configuration is necessary, and configure solves this challenge easily -- with an added bonus of telling whether you have everything you need to compile.

The configure-script can be, um, configured. This is something you most likely won't need to do, but it's easy to do if necessary. For a complete list of configure options, see Section 5, “Configure Options”

You can get the latest Bluefish version via CVS using the instructions in Section 3, “Latest Developmental Version” Enter the directory containing the bluefish source files:

$ cd bluefish-gtk

Next, you need to generate the configure script. That's accomplished by running

$ autoconf

Then, you run configure with whatever options you might want. This example will cause make install to install Bluefish with the specified directory as prefix (i.e. the binary is installed in /usr/local/bf-cvs/bin/bluefish). This is most likely not what you want -- just run configure without parameters instead.

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/bf-cvs

If configure fails, it'll probably give a hint telling you what's missing or wrong. Assuming it completed successfully, your next step is to compile Bluefish. To do this, run

$ make

When make has completed, you can install Bluefish: (su to root first, unless you specified a user writable prefix to configure)

# make install

To update the sources at a later time, you run the command cvs -z3 -q update from within the bluefish-gtk2 directory.

Can't compile? Well, your first step is to make sure you have the necessary utilities and libraries. See Section 1, “Requirements”. Next, see if your system is mentioned in Section 3, “System Specific Installation Issues”. Below is list of well known problems that have been mentioned on the bluefish-dev list. If you're unable to find a solution (or if you think you have a solution others might want), feel free to contact us on the bluefish-dev list (See Section 2.4, “Contact Us”).