The Board Project - Building, Hacking, Running

Building

Our goal is to be able to develop The Board as much as possible with existing GNOME components and to keep the build process simple. However, The Board requires bleeding-edge GNOME platform libraries that are not yet part of current distro releases. So, there is a small self-contained JHBuild moduleset that can be used to build The Board and its dependencies. Having this JHBuild setup will not affect your main system.

To start with this, download and run the setup script:

curl -O http://git.gnome.org/browse/the-board/plain/build/the-board-build-setup.sh
/bin/bash the-board-build-setup.sh

Now you can build the modules The Board depends on and The Board module itself. This will take a while as there are several dozen modules being built.

jhbuild -f ~/.jhbuildrc-the-board build

If you have successfully built in the past, but it suddenly stops working, try:

jhbuild -f ~/.jhbuildrc-the-board build -f -a -c

which will force it to rebuild everything from scratch.

While developing, for instance to rebuild the the-board component without its libs, from the current git branch that is not the master branch,

jhbuild -f ~/.jhbuildrc-the-board buildone -n the-board

should build the one the-board component without switching/pulling git branches.

Hacking

It's a good idea to hack on The Board inside JHBuild's shell so that it's there's no confusion between JHBuild's and system environment. You can enter a JHBuild shell by running:

jhbuild -f ~/.jhbuildrc-the-board shell

While in a JHBuild shell, hacking should go more or less like this:

cd ~/Code/the-board/the-board
# 1. Hack, Hack, Hack
# 2. Run make (if needed)
make
# 3. Try it out by running it uninstalled
./src/the-board-uninstalled

Running

Once The Board was successfully built and installed, you can run it:

jhbuild -f ~/.jhbuildrc-the-board run the-board

In any case (running installed or uninstalled), you should see The Board's window filling most of the screen.