Some additional Sugar notes recently appeared in "Plumbing Life's Depths ".
After attending PyCon, I polished up my GTK environment, reloading the current releases. Here's what I did to get a workable PyGTK on my various desktops.
The GTK Technology Stack
Here's an overview of the components of this stack:
- GLIB - the essential graphics library.
- GTK - the GIMP Toolkit, used to build interesting and useful applications.
- PyGTK - The Python bindings for the GTK toolkit.
Linux users will use an X11 Graphics server or GNOME, which implements glib, and interacts with GTK applications. Windows users will install binaries which implement the glib calls directly as window graphics operations.
Associated components that are essential to successful use of GTK:
- ATK (Accessibility Toolkit)
- Pango (text formatting)
- Cairo (printing)
This technology is supported, largely, by www.GNOME.org , www.GTK.org ` <http://www.gtk.org>`_ and www.pyGTK.org . Fink versions for Mac OS X tends to lag behind these other sites.
Gecko would also be a nice addition to this stack to render HTML.
Mac OS
See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_on_MacOS_X
We're assuming Python 2.4.4 is already installed.
The pyGTK makes use of an X window server. It might be nice to have native GTK+ without the overhead of X windows. There is a GTK+ for Mac OS X project (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gtk-osx/ ) This does not appear to be kept up-to-date.
Part 1 - Setup Fink
First, get dev-tools, known as XCode 2.4.1 from http://connect.apple.com . This will download a massive file named xcode_2.4.1_8m1910_6936315.dmg. This file almost a gigabyte in size. You can order a DVD, which might be quicker than downloading on an unreliable or low-speed connection. Install this.
Second, get Fink (http://www.finkproject.org/download/index.php?phpLang=en ). Install this.
You'll want to do a self-upgrade of Fink, which rebuilds itself using dev-tools. Run the Fink Commander, and look for Source menu. Select the "Self-Update-rsync" option to resynch Fink and the package descriptions that Fink knows about.
You'll then be advised to do an Update-All. This can take a very long time to complete. However, it applies updates to any add-on packages. You'll do this periodically to get additional updates.
You are looking for the complete stack (glib, GTK, X11), which is based on "unstable packages". Therefore, in Fink Commander, locate the preferences. The second tab (labeled "Fink") has a button for using unstable packages, make sure this is checked. This will add this collection of "unstable" packages.
Part 2 - Get pyGTK and GTK+
There are two groups of Fink packages that provide you the necessary Python bindings:
- pygobject2, which includes pygobject2-py24 and pygobject2-py24-dev.
- pygtk2, which includes pygtk2-gtk-py24, pygtk2-gtk-p24-dev and pygtk2-py24.
These Fink projects, in turn, depend on GLIB, and GTK+, so Fink should download and build these automatically.
When prompted, there is a choice between Apple's x11 vs xfree86. Which is better? My first choice was XFree86 ("XDarwin"), and this seems to work reasonably well. Later, there is a warning that switching back to Apple's X11 requires rebuilding from scratch, so perhaps X11 might have been a better choice. Currently, everything works, so I'm reluctant to change.
This drops some demo software in /usr/local/lib/pygtk.
Libraries are installed in /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages/gtk-2.0, plus /usr/local/bin/pygtk*.
What's important, however, is the final location of the completed software.
Part 3 - Using Fink's Packages
Fink places the software it builds in a directory named /sw. To make use of this new software, you need to put /sw/lib/python2.4/site-packages on your PYTHONPATH. You can do this one of two ways:
Edit your .profile to include the line export PYTHONPATH="/sw/lib/python2.4/site-packages" or edit the /etc/profile to include the same export statement.
Part 4 - Upgrades
Note that there are several components with different version numbers. This can make configuration management complex.
The GTK.org website (www.gtk.org ) has the following stable versions available.
- glib - 2.12
- GTK+ - 2.10
- Pango - 1.14
Fink tends to lag behind these versions. Version 2.6.3. is available in Fink. To upgrade to the GNOME distribution, you would have to do a more-or-less manual build, outside of Fink's management and control.
The pyGTK.org website (www.pygtk.org ) has bindings for GTK+ version 2.10 and glib version 2.12.
http://live.gnome.org/PyGTK has documentation and downloads, also.
Windows
The GLADE for Windows project (http://gladewin32.sourceforge.net offers glib, GTK+ for Windows. GTK+ is version 2.10.7 GLIB is version 2.12.7.
The gtk-2.10.7-win32-1.exe includes all of the Glib and GTK you'll need. Be sure to install it in C:GTK directory. It is a common mistake to attempt to install this in "Program Files"; this won't work well because of the space between Program and Files.
Then you'll need to get PyGTK, PyGObject and PyCairo from Gnome.ORG. These are pre-built binaries.