The Linux version of GDDCALC

We note parenthetically that of course you can always run the Windows version of GDDCALC on Linux using Wine, which is a "compatibility layer" that runs on Linux but executes Windows programs. This is possible, but may be difficult because Wine can be problemmatic on some systems. In any case, the Linux version of GDDCALC is more attractive and simpler to navigate. After downloading the Linux source code you will need to compile and install it yourself. Because you are using the Linux operating system rather than Windows or Apple's OS we can assume a higher degree of computer sophistication. We will briefly lay out the procedure here.

GDDCALC is written in C, so you will need the gcc compiler. Does your system contain gcc? You can find out by typeing

gcc -v

in a terminal. If gcc is not there, and you are in the Debian/Ubuntu/Mint world, you can install it with

sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential

If your system uses RPMs rather than apt (Fedora/Centos/etc.) the command is

dnf install gcc

Again, if you are running openSUSE, yast will install gcc. Once you have the proper compiler, you can download GDDCALC's source code, which is here. This is a gzipped tar file named gddcalc.tgz. Move it to a directory of your choice; unpack and compile it in that directory with

tar xzf gddcalc.tgz
chmod 744 compile
./compile

compile is a shell script included in the GDDCALC package. When the script is finished the executable gddcalc will be present in that directory. You can run it from there or move it elsewhere. You can start it in a terminal with

./gddcalc

But be aware that the first time you run the application you must make it executable with chmod 744 gddcalc. You can also run GDDCALC from your graphical desktop (KDE, XFCE, MATE, GNOME, etc. by linking it to an icon or other image of your choice and clicking on the icon. If you do this, set the Path variable in your desktop launcher to a path that contains both the executable gddcalc and the css file gddcalc.css that is included in the package you downloaded.

A prerequisite we have not mentioned is GTK. GDDCALC is a GUI application that uses the GTK toolkit, and so gtk-3.0 must be present in your system. Unless your system is idiosyncratic or extremely old it likely will have GTK. But if it does not, you should go ahead and install GTK. You can find out whether you have GTK by typing

pkg-config --exists gtk+-3.0 && echo "Gtk-3 is installed" || echo "Gtk-3 is not installed"

at a terminal.

Another possible issue is your shell. Almost all Linux distributions use the bash shell and so our compile script assumes that you are using bash. If you are not, then look at the first line of compile and change #!/bin/bash to whatever is appropriate for your system. As a Linux maven you know how to do this, right? But if you are having trouble with the Linux version of GDDCALC send us a message at this address and we may be able to work out a solution.

You may be interested to know that the software we have just discussed runs equally well under the OpenBSD operating system. The identical package (gddcalc.tgz) and the same gcc compiler can be used with OpenBSD. This may be true of the other BSDs but we have not tested GDDCALC there.