Setting Up Your GTK Workspace

Alright, so onto the meat of things! Before any of the magic happens, I need to set up my system so that I can actually build something.

Several months ago, I first tried doing this by reading the GTK Tutorial (also in my links), and it said I needed to download GTK source from the GTK website and install it from source. Needless to say, I had too much power in my hands than I knew what to do with and I trashed my Ubuntu box. Ok, so we’ll do this the easy way: Synaptic

Open up your Synaptic Package Manager and look for libgtk2.0-0, it should already be installed. Check to be sure. There should be several similar packages already installed, but the most important package is the libgtk2.0-0-dev. Hmm, I’ll install libgtk2.0-0-doc for good measure as well. Iwas going to install the libgtk2.0-0-dbg, too, but the package description says most people won’t need this, so scrap that.There are several more, but I think this is enough to get started.

After marking the packages (Synaptic will prompt you that it needs several more packages to install libgtk2.0-0-dev), click on the Apply button and we’re done! Man, this tutorial could be more interesting if it was just a little bit harder. On the other hand, at least I’m sure this won’t trash my desktop. Oh well.

[Edit] I forgot to say thanks to Kostkon and Compyx in the Ubuntu Forums for pointing me in this direction. Thanks!

Next >> Saying Hello World with GTK

A Short Introduction to GTK

What is GTK And Why Would I Want To Learn It?

I’ll try to keep this really short. First, GTK stands for the Gimp Toolkit and is the main toolkit used by GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment), although it is an object-oriented cross-platform toolkit that can be used to create applications independent of GNOME. Why is it called the Gimp Toolkit you ask? Well, it was originally written for the Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program, basically the equivalent of Photoshop in Linux). But since GTK had support for several languages, GTK was chosen as the toolkit for GNOME.

It uses LGPL, which means you won’t have to pay a penny for licenses and royalties, EVEN IF you’re program is not for personal or educational use e.g. commercial, paid programs. Programming with a toolkit allows your program to integrate well with your GNOME desktop, which means your program will have the same look and feel as your desktop theme. The toolkit also features high-level and easy to use widgets which are built on the concept of hierarchies and containers, which I’ll probably find out to be more useful than I think (think class hierarchies and inheritance, change the parent, change the children, et cetera).

Well, that was longer than I had wanted. So without further ado, I’m just gonna dive in and get ready to set up my GTK workspace.

Next >> Setting Up Your GTK Workspace