Compile GPlates on Fedora Linux

Overview

Note: this guide is out of date. GPlates has a new stable version (2.4.0) and the download link for the old source code doesn’t work anymore. GPlates is a free software program for modeling the tectonic history of a planet. It was designed with a scientific audience in mind, but it has also gained popularity among the worldbuilding community. GPlates has an Ubuntu package and both source- and binary-based Arch User Repository packages, but no package for Fedora Linux. One of the options for running GPlates on Fedora is to compile GPlates from source; this guide will show you how to do so. It was last confirmed to be working 2023-08-26.

Download and dependencies

As of Fedora 38, compiling fails on the most recent stable version of GPlates,¹ however the 2.3.1 beta 5 will compile as expected.² Download the 2.3.1 beta 5 source code and extract the downloaded archive to wherever you like.

Opening the file DEPS.Linux will show you what dependencies are required to compile GPlates on Ubuntu. Translating the packages to equivalent Fedora packages, we get the command:

sudo dnf install cmake g++ mesa-libGL-devel mesa-libGLU-devel glew-devel python3-devel python3-numpy boost-devel qt5-qtbase-devel qt5-qtxmlpatterns-devel gdal-devel CGAL-devel proj-devel qwt-qt5-devel zlib-devel libXrender-devel libICE-devel libSM-devel freetype-devel fontconfig-devel

Many of these are included by default in Fedora.

Compiling and installing

Open the folder with the GPlates source code and open a terminal there. Fedora puts Qwt in an odd spot, so you have to tell cmake where it is.³ Enter the command cmake . -DQWT_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/qt5/qwt. Once that has finished, run make. Compiling GPlates takes about 2 hours.

Once GPlates is done compiling, install it by running sudo make install.

Running GPlates

GPlates does not yet support Wayland, so you must run it with the environment variable QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb. This can be added to an alias or desktop entry.

References