Category: c plus plus

Manjaro is the first Linux distribution that I have used that wasn’t a branch off of Debian. While many things are the same, there are some notable differences. One of those differences is what it takes to set up a programming environment. With Debian based systems, you could get most of the requirements with a single command:

sudo get update && apt-get install build-essential

With Manjaro, however, there isn’t a single installation that will pull most of the build requirements to your computer. But that doesn’t mean that it is difficult to set Manjaro up for programming, it is just different.

Finding the necessary applications

Instead of having a meta package that will install all the other packages, Manjaro has a group that you can look up under the pamac program manager. The pamac program manager is also shown simply as “add/remove software” in the menu. If you are using the Gnome desktop environment, it will probably also have a shield icon on the bar at the top of your screen.

To find the necessary programming applications, open pamac and search for the following:

base-devel

Searching for “base-devel” will show you a group of related applications that are necessary for programming. Some of them will already be installed on your system. Others might not be needed depending on the kind of programming you want to do.

Here is the list that I currently have installed:

automake
binutils
file
findutils
gawk
gcc
gettext
grep
groff
gzip
libtool
make
pacman
pkgconf
sed
sudo
texinfo
which

Since I want to create graphical programs using the GTK toolkit, I also did the following search:

gtkmm3

and added the following packages:

gtkmm3
gtkmm3-docs

The gtkmm3 package is a C++ wrapper for the GTK toolkit. It allows you to access all of its classes using standard C++ syntax to create programs that natively use GTK (also sometimes called GTK+). This will allow your programs to run natively under both the Gnome and Cinnamon desktop environments. And of course the gtkmm3-docs package is the documentation that goes along with it.

This should give you all the tools you need to build C++ programs with Manjaro. In a future entry, we will look at installing and setting up the “VS Code” text editor.