This guide provides step-by-step instructions for building Guitar, a cross-platform Git GUI client, on Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions.
Before you begin, you’ll need to install the required dependencies:
sudo apt install build-essential ruby qmake6 libqt6core6 libqt6gui6 libqt6svg6-dev libqt6core5compat6-dev zlib1g-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libssl-dev
These packages include:
First, clone the Guitar repository:
git clone https://github.com/soramimi/Guitar.git
cd Guitar
The preparation script sets up the build environment:
ruby prepare.rb
This script performs necessary setup tasks for the build process.
Guitar uses libmagic for file type detection and requires it to be statically linked for consistent cross-platform behavior. Run the provided build script:
cd filetype
./build-gcc.sh
cd ..
This script will automatically build all required libmagic components including libfile, liboniguruma, and libfiletype.
Create a build directory and compile the project:
mkdir build
cd build
qmake6 ../Guitar.pro
make -j8
The -j8 flag enables parallel compilation using 8 threads. You can adjust this number based on your CPU cores.
After successful compilation, you can run Guitar from the build directory:
../_bin/Guitar