Compiling Gnucash 2.6.16 on Linux Mint 18.1

[Geert Janssens]

On donderdag 30 maart 2017 06:53:14 CEST DaveC49 wrote:
> Hi
> Has anyone else had any problems compiling Gnucash 2.6.16. I seem to get
> through the ./configure and make and sudo make install with no obvious
> problems.
> 
> The executable is installed in /usr/local/bin with libraries in
> /usr/local/lib/gnucash and configuration in /usr/local/etc/gnucash.( At
> present I am not getting an icon in the menu but I can fix that later.
> $ whereis gnucash
> gnucash: /usr/local/bin/gnucash /usr/local/etc/gnucash
> /usr/local/lib/gnucash
> 
> When I attempt to start gnucash (/usr/local/bin gnucash, I get a message
> "/usr/local/bin/gnucash: error while loading shared libraries:
> libgnc-gnome.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or
> directory".
> 
> This is a link to libgnc-gnome.so.0.0.0 and both the link and the linked
> file are located in /usr/local/lib.
> 
> This is the same as my 2.6.15 (also compiled from sources on LM18.1 Serena)
> on a desktop and working fine. The permissions on the libgnc-gnome.so
> related files are also the same on both machines.
> 
> Following an earlier post by John Ralls in response to a similar problem
> with 2.6.15
> (https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2015-September/061847.html
> ) /etc/ld.so.conf.d/libc.conf loads /usr/local/lib and is called by
> /etc/ld.so.conf.
> 
> I ran sudo ldconfig and gnucash 2.6.16 then started up and loaded a data
> file gener ated from 2.6.15 with no apparent problems although GTK issued a
> message "Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "atk-bridge". on startup. Not
> sure what this means. I have Libatk1.0-0, Libatk1.0-dev, Libatk-bridge2.0-0,
> Libatk-bridge2.0-dev and Libatkmm1.6-1v5 ( but not the headers from the
> last library) already loaded.

Gnucash is not using libatk (Gnome's Accessibility ToolKit interface) directly. It's used by gtk to 
provide accessibility support to all gtk based applications. I have never built gtk myself, so I 
can't give you any advice on how to get this fixed. Perhaps there's a configure time parameter 
or environment variable that can be set while building gtk to tell it where to find libatk. You 
could try to run "./configure --help" in your gtk source directory for more information.

If no one on the gnucash list can provide a solution, your best bet for an answer would be on a 
gtk support list.

> 
> During the./configure stage I had to load quite a few other packages than
> those mentioned in the dependencies some to do with getting gtk compiled and
> installed (listed below).

That is to be expected. Our build documentation only talks about what's needed to build 
gnucash. gtk2 is one such dependency, but we don't describe what's needed to build *that*. On 
distributions on general we assume it to be available as a package from the distro's package 
repositories.
> 
> Linux Mint 18.1 Serena  clean install from ISO
> sudo apt install build-essentials

Did you also try
sudo apt-get build-dep gnucash

I believe that is the command to get all of gnucash' build dependencies installed.


> 12 gtk+2.0    download http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gtk+/2.24/
> version 2.24.31  compiled from sources

Makes me wonder: why did you choose to compile gtk+2 from sources ?

> 
> Gnucash 2.6.16 appears to be working OK, I can view registers,open splits
> etc but I am not too confident about using it for production activities at
> this stage. no posts I have found re the atk-bridge not

I think the error message about atk-bridge not being found are not critical. No doubt you won't 
have assistive technologies at you disposal but I'd expect gnucash to work fine otherwise.

Geert