Getting Started With the Felix GUI

Felix comes with a library to create platform independent graphical user interfaces. It uses the Simple Direct Media Layer, version 2, SDL2 system with add-ons to do this.

SDL2 runs on Linux, OSX, Windows, iOS and Android and is designed for implementation of portable games.

Installation

For the Felix GUI to work, development versions of the following components must be installed:

SDL2
SDL2_image
SDL2_ttf
SDL2_gfx

On Linux using apt package manager do this:

sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev
sudo apt-get install libsdl2_image-dev
sudo apt-get install libsdl2_ttf-dev
sudo apt-get install libsdl2_gfx-dev

Felix already contains database entries for these packages, but at the time of writing this tutorial, the libraries are expected to be in /usr/local which is where you would put them if you built them yourself.

However Debian filesystem layout standards used by Linux OS such as Ubuntu that use apt package manager put components in /usr/ instead. So unfortunately you will have to modify the database by hand by editing these files

build/release/host/config/sdl2.fpc
build/release/host/config/sdl2_image.fpc
build/release/host/config/sdl2_ttf.fpc

replacing /usr/local with just /usr. To preserved these modifications across upgrades, you should also copy the files:

cp build/release/host/config/sdl2.fpc $HOME/.felix/config
cp build/release/host/config/sdl2_image.fpc $HOME/.felix/config
cp build/release/host/config/sdl2_ttf.fpc $HOME/.felix/config

I hope this problem can be reduced in future versions, but it is likely to be an issue for some time because most developers will have a libraries installed in both places, depending on whether they’re using a package manager to install them, or building from source.

To check your installation works, do this:

make tutopt-check

and a series of tests will run which use the Felix GUI and SDL2.