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
The KDE Education Project