4.2.2 Requirements for compiling LilyPond

This section contains instructions on how to quickly and easily get all the software packages required to build LilyPond.

Most of the more popular Linux distributions only require a few simple commands to download all the software needed. For others, there is an explicit list of all the individual packages (as well as where to get them from) for those that are not already included in your distributions’ own repositories.

Additional software packages are necessary to compile LilyPond’s documentation from its sources; this gets handled in a later section.


Fedora

The following instructions were tested on ‘Fedora’ versions 22 & 23 and will download all the software required to both compile LilyPond and build the documentation.

Note: By default, when building LilyPond’s documentation, pdfTeX is used. However ligatures (fi, fl, ff, etc.) may not be printed in the PDF output. In this case XeTeX can be used instead. Download and install the texlive-xetex package.

sudo dnf install texlive-xetex

The scripts used to build the LilyPond documentation will use XeTeX instead of pdfTeX to generate the PDF documents if it is available. No additional configuration is required.


Linux Mint

The following instructions were tested on ‘Linux Mint 17.1’ and ‘LMDE - Betsy’ and will download all the software required to both compile LilyPond and build the documentation..

Note: By default, when building LilyPond’s documentation, pdfTeX is used. However ligatures (fi, fl, ff, etc.) may not be printed in the PDF output. In this case XeTeX can be used instead. Download and install the texlive-xetex package.

sudo apt-get install texlive-xetex

The scripts used to build the LilyPond documentation will use XeTeX instead of pdfTeX to generate the PDF documents if it is available. No additional configuration is required.


OpenSUSE

The following instructions were tested on ‘OpenSUSE 13.2’ and will download all the software required to both compile LilyPond and build the documentation.

Note: By default, when building LilyPond’s documentation, pdfTeX is used. However ligatures (fi, fl, ff, etc.) may not be printed in the PDF output. In this case XeTeX can be used instead. Download and install the texlive-xetex package.

sudo zypper install texlive-xetex

The scripts used to build the LilyPond documentation will use XeTeX instead of pdfTeX to generate the PDF documents if it is available. No additional configuration is required.


Ubuntu

The following commands were tested on Ubuntu versions 14.04 LTS, 14.10 and 15.04 and will download all the software required to both compile LilyPond and build the documentation.

Note: By default, when building LilyPond’s documentation, pdfTeX is used. However ligatures (fi, fl, ff, etc.) may not be printed in the PDF output. In this case XeTeX can be used instead. Download and install the texlive-xetex package.

sudo apt-get install texlive-xetex

The scripts used to build the LilyPond documentation will use XeTeX instead of pdfTeX to generate the PDF documents if it is available. No additional configuration is required.


Other

The following software packages are required to compile LilyPond, in addition to the run-time packages (see Requirements for running LilyPond).


LilyPond — Contributor’s Guide v2.24.4 (stable-branch).