general installation issues

A few considerations before installing may be neccessary. The latest GTK1-version is v0.7, which is no longer updated. Unless you really want the project management feature or only have GTK1 installed, you should use the latest GTK2-version. A lot of bugs have been corrected, along with updates and new features.

If you want the latest and greatest, read about CVS in the section called “installing a bluefish source distribution” below. If you simply want to use Bluefish, get the latest stable package that fit your system.

how to get bluefish

Bluefish is available through several different channels. Many Linux distributions ship a version of Bluefish or make it available through their package systems. I.e., Bluefish is available through the Debian apt-system and FreeBSD's ports. You may check if Bluefish is available through your favourite software installer.

The main source is the Bluefish website, where the software and a few contributions are available. The download page is reachable at http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/download.html. Here, you may download the source code and binary packages for Debian, Red Hat and Mandrake.

operating systems supported by bluefish

Bluefish has been reported to work on a number of systems. The Bluefish team mainly support these platforms:

  • Mandrake Linux
  • Red Hat Linux
  • Debian Linux
  • FreeBSD

Actually, any GNU/Linux distribution with GTK2 is fine -- many distributions also include Bluefish. Actually, the fish will likely work nicely on any POSIX compatible OS where GTK2 is available. Bluefish has been reported to work on

  • NetBSD - distributed in pkgsrc
  • OpenBSD - available through their ports system
  • SGI IRIX - see http://freeware.sgi.com/
  • Mac OS X
  • Sun Solaris
  • Tru64
  • AIX
  • HP-UX
  • Win32-cygwin - with a few nags.

which bluefish version to use

Currently, four versions of bluefish are available:

  • The GTK1-version (v0.7) is deprecated and no longer updated, but is the choice for those of you still running GTK1.
  • The latest GTK2-version (v0.10) is the version of choice for most users. It's the latest addition to the Bluefish tree, and is regarded as stable enough for daily use.
  • The latest development snapshot is always one step further than the latest stable release. You'll find some new features, bugs fixed and a prettier gui. The catch is that it may have unfinished, perhaps buggy, features. Try this if you want to see new features, or if there's a bug in the latest stable release that bothers you.
  • CVS - the bleeding edge of Bluefish development. You want this if there's a bug that bothers you, but is unfixed even in the latest snapshot, if you want to contribute a patch, or simply want the bleeding edge feature set. The CVS may be unusable for short periods of time, but will often be stable enough for daily use.

As commented in the section called “how and when updates are released”, the long time between stable releases make the CVS snapshots and current CVS an interesting choice.

how and when updates are released

the development is always a deep black hole, but sometimes there is an new release :-)

-- Danny Reeh (Bluefish development team)

A long time pass between each release. The Bluefish development is not too rapid, there's a small number of developers, and we occationally want to use Bluefish, not only develop it. :-)

Because of the long periods of time between releases, the current CVS or CVS snapshots may be what you want to use. Bugs will be fixed and new features introduced. We do try to keep the CVS version usable at any time (actually, the CVS version is used by most of the development team, daily).

system specific notes

Different systems have different approaches to solutions and packaging. You might find the information below interesting.

Mandrake:

  • libpcre: Breaks pcre into 3 different pieces, make sure pcre-devel is installed if compiling from source. Try this command:
    $ rpm -ql pcre-devel
  • ... more nags with Mandrake?

Debian:

  • If you are running unstable, you may experience unstability (ha ha) with Bluefish. Make sure it's not just caused by a buggy version of GTK2. If the bug is very obscure and strange, GTK may be the villain.
  • ... more nags with Debian? Of course not...? -- Christian