Compiling Hildon Applications on UNIX

To compile a Hildon application, you need to tell the compiler where to find the Hildon header files and libraries. This is done with the pkg-config utility.

The following interactive shell session demonstrates how pkg-config is used (the actual output on your system may be different):

$ pkg-config --cflags hildon-1
-DMAEMO_CHANGES -DMAEMO_GTK -I/usr/include/hildon-1 -I/usr/include/gtk-2.0 -I/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include -I/usr/include/atk-1.0 -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/pango-1.0
-I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/libpng12 -I/usr/include/pixman-1
$ pkg-config --libs hildon-1
-lhildon-1 -lgtk-x11-2.0 -lgdk-x11-2.0 -latk-1.0 -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lpangocairo-1.0 -lpango-1.0 -lcairo -lgobject-2.0 -lgmodule-2.0 -lglib-2.0

The simplest way to compile a program is to use the "backticks" feature of the shell. If you enclose a command in backticks (not single quotes), then its output will be substituted into the command line before execution. So, to compile a Hildon Hello World you should type the following:

$ cc `pkg-config --cflags --libs hildon-1` hello.c -o hello

If you want to make sure that your program doesn't use any deprecated functions, you can define the preprocessor symbol HILDON_DISABLE_DEPRECATED by using the command line option -DHILDON_DISABLE_DEPRECATED=1.