OpenVSP on Fedora 42 / Arch Linux and Wayland

[Carlos Rodriguez]

Hello everyone, 

I’m interested in installing OpenVSP on Fedora 42 or Arch Linux. Are there any known issues or recommendations for these distributions? I have tried on my desktop (Fedora 42) following the build instructions but no luck. 

Also, since both use Wayland by default, is OpenVSP compatible with Wayland, or does it require XWayland?

Thanks in advance for your guidance!

Best,

Carlos

[lsol...@gmail.com]

Hey Carlos, what issues are you having? I have been trying to compile OpenVSP on Fedora42 as well but am running into issues with stepcode. After some digging, it appears that the latest version of gcc (15.2.1) has dropped support for some older code syntax that is used by the version of stepcode packaged with OpenVSP. I tried replacing the packaged version of stepcode with that from the official stepcode github and was able to successfully build all the libraries, but now the main build is failing with stepcode issues again so I'm still hunting that down. I don't think Wayland is an issue as I was able to build OpenVSP on Fedora41 and was using Wayland there.

https://groups.google.com/g/openvsp/c/NtF0WNJKAcw/m/pcxvhMXKAQAJ

Lars

[Rob McDonald]

I would be interested in your progress on STEPCode.

The version packaged with OpenVSP is from a long time back -- and a lot of progress has been made, but STEPCode is not a centrally managed project.  Consequently, changes are made by different users that frequently don't get integrated into a central core.  Likewise, their changes may not go in a single direction.

The point is, a lot of the changes have been to the STEPCode build system and how it integrates with external projects -- OpenVSP used STEPCode in a somewhat unconventional way.  So, when I've looked at updating, it has looked rather challenging.

As you say, Wayland should not be a problem.  OpenVSP uses FLTK.  FLTK can be compiled to work with only Wayland, only X, or either Wayland or X (detected at runtime).  OpenVSP shouldn't care, it will just use whatever FLTK uses.

I try to statically link all the libraries I can, but on a Linux platform, you are much more likely to use a packaged library and shared libraries -- so you'll use whatever FLTK was built by the packaging team.

Rob

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[lsol...@gmail.com]

I was finally able to build 3.46.0 ... using a prebuilt version of stepcode from a successful openvsp build that I did on Fedora41 a while back. Not exactly a permanent fix. The stepcode repo shows a commit 2yrs ago (db2c3d8) that updated 5 files for compatibility with newer compilers. I replaced the openvsp supplied files with those ones, which fixed the original errors, but then returned new errors. I started replacing each file giving an error with the version from the stepcode repo which would fix the previous error but lead to new ones. After replacing 10 or so files I gave up and used the prebuilt library.

Lars

[Carlos Rodriguez]

Hello again,

I have finally installed 3.46.0 version too. Initially I tried to compile from source the STEPCODE library using gcc 15 (default in Fedora 43) and then use the system STEPCODE on the cmake and build steps with the flag: -DVSP_USE_SYSTEM_STEPCODE=ON, but then during the main OpenVSP build, it failed with:  "fatal error: STEPfile.h: No such file or directory"

In the end I dropped this method and tried simply compiling with gcc/g++-14 instead and I has worked!. In case it is useful to anyone I will leave here all the steps I followed.

===========================================
# Install prevous gcc/g++ version

sudo dnf install gcc14-c++

# Clone repo

git clone https://github.com/OpenVSP/OpenVSP.git
cd ~/OpenVSP

# Build libraries
mkdir buildlibs
cd buildlibs

cmake ../Libraries \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/bin/gcc-14 \
  -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/g++-14

make -j8

# Build OpenVSP
cd ~/OpenVSP
mkdir build
cd build

cmake ../src \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DVSP_LIBRARY_PATH=../buildlibs \
  -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/bin/gcc-14 \
  -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/g++-14

make -j8

# Install system wide
sudo make install

#Integrate into desktop
sudo tee /usr/share/applications/openvsp.desktop << 'EOF'
[Desktop Entry]
Name=OpenVSP
Comment=Open Vehicle Sketch Pad - Parametric Aircraft Geometry Tool
Exec=/usr/local/vsp
Icon=openvsp
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Science;Engineering;Graphics;
EOF

#Copy icon
sudo cp /usr/local/vspIcon.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/256x256/apps/openvsp.png
sudo gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/hicolor/ 
==================================================

Cheers,
Carlos