This page describes the Ice source distribution, including information about compiler requirements, third-party dependencies, and instructions for building and testing the distribution. If you prefer, you can download binary packages for supported platforms that contain pre-compiled libraries, executables, and everything else necessary to build Ice applications on Linux.
On this page:
C++ Build Requirements for Linux
Ice is expected to build and run properly on any recent Linux distribution for x86 and x86_64, and was extensively tested using the operating systems and compiler versions listed on our platforms page.
Third-party Libraries
Ice has dependencies on a number of third-party libraries:
- Berkeley DB 5.3
- expat 2.0
- OpenSSL 0.9.8 or later
- bzip2 1.0
- mcpp 2.7.2 (with patches)
Some of these packages may have been included in your Linux distribution. For those packages that are not installed or have an older version than what is listed above, we recommend downloading the Ice third-party source archive. This archive contains the source distributions for each of the third-party dependencies, as well as required source patches and configuration instructions.
ZeroC also supplies RPMs at the link above for Berkeley DB on RHEL 6, AMZN and SLES 11, as well as packages for Ubuntu 13.04.
Compiling and Testing Ice for C++ on Linux
Extract the Ice archive in any directory you like (for example, in your home directory):
$ tar xvfz Ice-3.5.1.tar.gz
Change the working directory to Ice-3.5.1/cpp:
$ cd Ice-3.5.1/cpp
Edit config/Make.rules to establish your build configuration. The comments in the file provide more information. Pay particular attention to the variables that define the locations of the third-party libraries.
Now you're ready to build Ice:
$ make
This will build the Ice core libraries, services, tests and examples.
Python is required to run the test suite. After a successful build, you can run the tests as follows:
$ make test
This command is equivalent to:
$ python allTests.py
If everything worked out, you should see lots of "ok" messages. In case of a failure, the tests abort with "failed".
If you want to try out any of the demos, make sure to update your PATH environment variable to add the bin directory, and your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to add the lib directory:
$ export PATH=`pwd`/bin:$PATH$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
64-bit Source Builds on Linux x86_64
To build Ice in 64-bit mode, you need to do the following:
- Obtain or build all the third-party dependencies, and put the 64-bit libraries in the
lib64directories. For example, put Berkeley DB 64-bit libraries in$DB_HOME/lib64. - Build and test as described above (with gcc).
32-bit Source Builds on Linux x86_64
By default, builds on x86_64 are 64-bit. To perform a 32-bit build on a x86_64 Linux system, set the environment variable LP64 to no, as shown below:
$ export LP64=no
Installing a C++ Source Build on Linux
Simply run make install. This will install Ice in the directory specified by the prefix variable in config/Make.rules.
After installation, make sure that the prefix/bin directory is in your PATH.
If you choose to not embed a runpath into executables at build time (see your build settings in cpp/config/Make.rules) or did not create a symbolic link from the runpath directory to the installation directory, you also need to add the prefix/lib directory to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
When compiling Ice programs, you must pass the location of the prefix/include directory to the compiler with the -I option, and the location of the prefix/lib directory with the -L option.
On an x86_64 system, the libraries are installed in prefix/lib64 unless LP64 is set to no. No other changes are necessary.