Installation

This page is rarely edited. See the better maintained page InstallationGuide.

Windows

In order to install Gobby on Microsoft Windows, you need to install some tools, if you don't have them already. It takes a minute or three, and it is relatively painless. Follow the three steps below, in that order. When prompted for questions during installations, answer yes. When asked to choose between different versions of Gtk or Gtkmm or whatever G-initial, choose the smallest version.

1. Download and install the Gtkmm Runtime Environment, it will download Gtk if necessary

2. Download Gobby's 0.4.1 installer, and install Gobby as any Windows program

Linux

This depends a bit on your distribution. For debian-based distributions (Debian, *buntu) a simple sudo apt-get install gobby should suffice. If you have a Red Hat-based distribution (Fedora, Mandrake, CentOS), the magic chant should be: sudo yum install gobby. For Gentoo it is: sudo emerge gobby.

Mac OS X

Prerequisite: Mac OS X needs X11

To be able to run Gobby on Mac OS X, you will need X11 on your machine. To check if you have X11 on your machine, issue the command which X in Terminal. If the answer is X is /usr/X11R6/bin/X then you have it, otherwise you will have to install X11. To install X11 you will have to put the Mac OS X install DVD into your DVD-drive. Open a terminal and write the following command: open /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD//System/Installation/Packages/X11User.pkg. An Installer window will be opened. Install the program as any Mac applications, and you are ready to continue.

The installation itself

The easiest way to install Gobby for Mac OS X, is fetching and installing the tarball hosted by the project Divvun.no. This is a 351 MB file. This will be placed on your desktop as a file called gobby.tar.bz2. This is actually a tarball of DarwinPorts compiled for Mac OS X ppc. Unpack this file using the following command in Terminal: sudo tar xjf $HOME/Desktop/gobby.tar.bz2 -C /.

Note: The preceding paragraph appears to be obsolete. As far as I can tell, Divvun is no longer hosting the Gobby tarball. This means that MacPorts/DarwinPorts? has been the usual way to go for installing Gobby on Mac OS. However, for those of us who prefer Homebrew to MacPorts, I've just put up a formula on my Homebrew fork. Just grab that fork, type brew install gobby, and it should Just Work. Hopefully this will be incorporated into the official Homebrew repository soon.--Marnen Laibow-Koser, 10 Jun 2011

Installing DarwinPorts, then Gobby

If you want to take a little longer path, you must install the X11-SDK. The next step is to install DarwinPorts to your own machine, then install gobby using the command sudo /usr/local/bin/ports install gobby. This is going to take a l-o-o-ng time (5-6 hours on a PowerBook? G4). Suggestion: Write this command shortly before going to bed, and then sleep well. When this is finished you can issue the following command to "place" Gobby into your Applications folder: sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/gobby /Applications/Gobby.