How to obtain Marble

This page describes how to build and install Marble

To obtain pre-built packages of Marble for your favourite operating system, please visit: KDE Apps.

You might be able to obtain a more recent version of this document here

NOTE: This file describes how to build Marble as a stand-alone
      application.  If you are building Marble as part of the KDE-EDU
      module, then you should instead read the file INSTALL in the top
      level directory of this module and ignore this one.  This is
      most likely ../INSTALL.

Prerequisites for building Marble are:

Qt 4.3 or newer
cmake version 2.4 or newer
(optional): kdelibs from the KDE subversion repositories. We have found that revision 701563 (Marble v.0.4.0) works fine. Note that kdelibs is under heavy development, and some revisions might not work.

A checkout of Marble. You can check out Marble trunk (the unstable development version) using SVN via the command:

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdeedu/marble

If you have a KDE developer account you might want to use:

svn co https://svn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdeedu/marble

You can build and install Marble in two different ways:

As a Qt-only application.
As a KDE application, using kdelibs and KDE based classes.

Choose one of them and read below for how to do it.

NOTE: If you wish to build Marble with debug info include the argument -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debug in the cmake command below.

1. Build Marble as a Qt only application.

1.1 Create a build directory

Create a build directory parallel to the source directory. Suppose that the source directory is named 'marble'. Then create a new directory called 'marble-build'.

1.2 Configure the build tree

Go into the build directory and type

  cmake -DQTONLY=ON ../marble

1.3 Build marble

Also in the build directory, type:

  make

1.4 Install marble

Finally, also from the build directory, type:

  make install

and start Marble either from the menu or via the command line:

  marble

2. Build Marble as a KDE application.

2.1 Create a build directory

This is the same step as for a Qt-only build:

Create a build directory parallel to the source directory. Suppose that the source directory is named 'marble'. Then create a new directory called 'marble-build'.

2.2 Configure the build tree

Go into the build directory and type

  cmake ../marble

From now on the steps are the same as for a Qt-only build.

2.3 Build marble

  make

2.4 Install marble

  make install

and start Marble either from the menu or via the command line:

  marble

3 Adjust Marble's search path for the maps and data

There are several ways to adjust the path where Marble is drawing it's data from:

3.1 At Compiletime

Use the cmake option -DMARBLE_DATA_PATH to specify the built-in system path that Marble gathers its data from:

Example:

  cmake -DQTONLY=ON -DMARBLE_DATA_PATH /mnt1/marble/data ~/marble

3.2 "At Runtime"

There are two solutions to adjust the data path for a precompiled Marble binary:

a) Enter a key and a value

marbleDataPath="/smb/marble/data"

to the config file "marblerc" or "~/.config/KDE/Marble\ Desktop\ Globe.conf" and (re)start the application.

b) Start Marble using the command line option --marbleDataPath:

marble --marbleDataPath ~/marble/data

4. Known Issues:

- Marble 0.5.1 crashes at times on some Windows XP systems if compiled with MSVC on Microsoft Windows in Release mode. We are currently investigating the issue.

Last update: 2008-02-12