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Getting ELinks up and running

Installing ELinks should be pretty easy on most systems. Below is described the whole process of configuring the compilation, compiling and installing.

Building and Installing ELinks

The quick guide for the impatient. Issue the following commands from the ELinks source directory:

$ ./configure && make && make install

However you might consider to tweek a few compile time options before building ELinks. You might also want to take a look at what libraries and programs are required or recommended that you install.

Requirements

To successfully install ELinks all that is required is GNU make (version 3.78 or later) and a C compiler. If you want to install directly from GIT it is also required that automake and autoconf is installed on your system.

Recommended Libraries and Programs

To make use of many of ELinks features you will need to have some external libraries and utility programs installed on your system. It is recommended to have the following libraries and programs installed:

Dependency Description
Lua or Guile Makes it possible to write scripting plugins. See the Elinks - Lua interface for more info.
zlib 1.2.0.2 or later For handling gzip or deflate compressed documents both locally and sent from server.
bzip2 Likewise, for bzip2 compressed documents.
LZMA Utils Likewise, for LZMA compressed documents. Version 4.32.5 should work. XZ Utils does not work.
OpenSSL or GNU TLS For handling secure HTTP browsing.
pkg-config Needed for locating some libraries (at least GNU TLS and TRE)
GPM General Purpose Mouse for mouse support.
expat XML Parser Toolkit needed for XBEL support.
TRE For regexp searching. Version 0.7.5 works.
libsmbclient Library needed for smb:// protocol support.
rxvt-unicode For terminal emulator which supports 88 colors.
xterm with 256 colors Program atleast patch level 179 or rxvt program from version 2.7.9 for support of 256 colors. Newer PuTTY also has 256 color support.
libidn For internationalized domain names.
SpiderMonkey Mozilla's JavaScript engine for getting JavaScript/ECMAScript support in ELinks. See also notes on ECMAScript support.

When compiling, you also need the header files for the libraries. Most OS distributors put a given library's headers in a package separate from the library itself; this package usually has -dev or similar appended to its name.

Further reading

This installation guide is far from being complete. You are also advised to read the README and the INSTALL files distributed with ELinks for further up to date info on building and installing.


Last Modified: 23-May-2009 12:51:06 EEST. Validate: CSS XHTML.