1 Cross-compiling LibreOffice
2 ***************************
4 Cross-compilation works, to various degree, to the following
5 platforms: Windows, iOS, Android, and Raspbian.
11 In GNU Autoconf terminology, "build" is the platform on which you are
12 running a build of some software and "host" is the platform on which
13 the software you are building will run. Only in the specific case of
14 building compilers and other programming tools is the term "target"
15 used to indicate the platform for which the tools your are building
16 will produce code. As LibreOffice is not a compiler, the "target" term
17 should not be used in the context of cross-compilation.
19 (For a case where all three of "build", "host" and "target" are
20 different: consider a gcc cross-compiler running on Windows, producing
21 code for Android, where the cross-compiler itself was built on
22 Linux. (This is a real case.) An interesting tidbit is that such
23 configurations are called "Canadian Cross".)
25 Even though the LibreOffice build mechanism is highly unorthodox, the
26 configure script takes the normal --build and --host options like any
27 GNU Autoconf -based configure script. To cross-compile, you basically
28 need just to specify a suitable --host option and things should work
29 out nicely. In practice, many details need to be handled. See examples
32 Note that in the case of LibreOffice, it is uncommon to run the
33 configure script directly. Normally one uses the autogen.sh script.
34 The autogen.sh script reads command-line options from file called
35 autogen.input if it exists. The typical way of working is to keep
36 the configure parameters in that file and edit it as needed.
39 What is so hard, then?
40 ----------------------
42 Despite the fact that the configure script takes normal --build and
43 --host options, that is just the beginning. It was necessary to
44 separate tests for "host" and "build" platforms in the configure
45 script. See the git log for details. And the reasonably "standard"
46 configure.in is just the top level; when we get down to the actual
47 makefilery used to build the bits of LibreOffice, it gets much worse.
53 There was some support in LibreOffice already from OpenOffice.org days
54 for building it locally on Windows with the GNU tool-chain (MinGW).
55 Apparently, those doing that work never attempted cross-compilation.
57 This OOo-originated MinGW support attempts to be for both running the
58 Cygwin gcc in its -mno-cygwin mode, and a Windows-native MinGW
59 compiler. The -mno-cygwin mechanism in the Cygwin gcc is rapidly being
60 obsoleted, if it isn't already, and we have not attempted to try to
61 keep it working; in fact we have actively cleaned out mechanisms
62 related to this. Ditto for native MinGW. If one compiles natively on
63 Windows, just use a version of Microsoft's compiler. OpenOffice.org
64 and LibreOffice have been built for Windows all the time using that.
66 The only case where it makes sense to use MinGW is for
67 cross-compilation. There is just too much crack involved on Windows
68 anyway, and it is a semi-miracle that the MSVC build under Cygwin
69 works as nicely as it does.
71 MinGW is available as cross-build toolchains pre-packaged in more or
72 less official packages for many Linux distros including Debian, Fedora
73 and openSUSE. For instance, the mingw32 packages in the Open Build
74 Service, running on openSUSE, can be found at:
76 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/windows:/mingw:/win32/
78 For example, you can install it like this:
80 zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/windows:/mingw:/win32/<your_os>/windows:mingw:win32.repo
82 where <your_os> is one of SLE_11, SLE_11_SP1, openSUSE_XX.Y, or
85 zypper in mingw32-cross-gcc mingw32-cross-gcc-c++ mingw32-python-devel \
86 mingw32-python mingw32-libboost_date_time \
87 mingw32-libexpat-devel mingw32-libexpat mingw32-boost-devel \
88 mingw32-libhyphen-devel mingw32-libhyphen mingw32-hyphen-en \
89 mingw32-liblpsolve mingw32-liblpsolve-devel \
90 mingw32-libxml2-devel mingw32-libxslt-devel mingw32-libicu \
91 mingw32-libicu-devel mingw32-libgraphite2 mingw32-libgraphite2-devel \
92 mingw32-libcairo2 mingw32-cairo-devel mingw32-librsvg mingw32-librsvg-devel \
93 mingw32-hunspell mingw32-hunspell-devel mingw32-libcurl \
94 mingw32-libcurl-devel mingw32-libneon mingw32-libneon-devel \
95 mingw32-libopenssl mingw32-libopenssl-devel mingw32-libexttextcat \
96 mingw32-libexttextcat-devel mingw32-libdb mingw32-libdb-devel \
97 mingw32-cross-pkg-config mingw32-pkg-config mingw32-libcppunit \
98 mingw32-libcppunit-devel mingw32-libredland mingw32-libredland-devel \
99 mingw32-libmythes mingw32-libmythes-devel mingw32-mozilla-nss \
100 mingw32-mozilla-nss-devel mingw32-mozilla-nspr \
101 mingw32-mozilla-nspr-devel mingw32-libpoppler mingw32-libpoppler-devel
103 You also need wine, ideally:
105 zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine/<your_os>/Emulators:Wine.repo
107 zypper in wine wine-devel wine-devel-32bit
109 And in order to be able to use 'winegcc -m32', also
111 zypper in glibc-devel-32bit gcc-32bit
113 There might be more that are missing, please read carefully what autogen.sh
114 tells you, and either remove one of the --with-system-*, or install the
117 It also looks like graphite2.pc needs tweaking in order to work right; but
118 that's likely to be fixed in the openSUSE project.
120 It is somewhat unclear how well thought-out the conditionals and code
121 for MinGW inside the OOo-originated code in LibreOffice actually
122 are. It often seems a bit randomish, with copy-pasting having been
123 preferred to factoring out differences.
125 Most of the configuration settings are maintained in the
126 distro-configs/LibreOfficeMinGW.conf file, so in your autogen.input,
129 CC=ccache i686-w64-mingw32-gcc
130 CXX=ccache i686-w64-mingw32-g++
131 CC_FOR_BUILD=ccache gcc
132 CXX_FOR_BUILD=ccache g++
133 --with-distro=LibreOfficeMinGW
135 Alternatively, you can use something like the following; but the
136 preferred way is to keep the LibreOfficeMinGW.conf file up-to-date.
138 CC=ccache i686-w64-mingw32-gcc
139 CXX=ccache i686-w64-mingw32-g++
140 CC_FOR_BUILD=ccache gcc
141 CXX_FOR_BUILD=ccache g++
142 --build=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
143 --host=i686-w64-mingw32
144 --with-distro=LibreOfficeWin32
147 --disable-ext-nlpsolver
148 --disable-report-builder
149 --disable-scripting-beanshell
150 --disable-scripting-javascript
151 --disable-ext-wiki-publisher
153 --enable-python=system
154 --with-system-altlinuxhyph
157 --with-system-cppunit
160 --with-system-hunspell
167 --with-system-lpsolve
170 --with-system-openssl
171 --with-system-redland
174 --without-helppack-integration
175 --without-myspell-dicts
177 Once you have compiled it, you may want to try to run it, for instance
181 $ tar xf <your-build-dir>/workdir/wntgcci.pro/installation/LibreOffice_Dev/archive/install/en-US/LibO-Dev_4.1.0.0.alpha0_Win_x86_archive.tar.gz
182 $ cd LibO-Dev_4.1.0.0.alpha0_Win_x86_archive/LOdev\ 4.1/program/
185 NB. it is important to unpack somewhere low in the hierarchy structure (like
186 in /tmp as advised above), otherwise you'll get BerkeleyDB errors on startup.
188 And if you are brave enough, you can even debug it. First you have to add the
189 URE dll's to the wine's PATH using 'wine regedit' - see
190 http://www.winehq.org/docs/wineusr-guide/environment-variables, and add
191 Z:\tmp\LibO-Dev_4.1.0.0.alpha0_Win_x86_archive/LOdev\ 4.1\URE\bin
192 to "Path" in My Computer->HKEY_CURRENT_USER->Environment.
196 $ winedbg soffice.bin
198 Would be great to be able to use winedbg --gdb, but it was crashing here :-( -
199 but maybe you'll be more lucky.
201 Tricks of some use with winedbg:
202 --------------------------------
204 To examine OUStrings, you might want to use the following trick (prints 50
205 unicode characters of rLibName OUString - the +10 is where the buffer starts):
207 Wine-dbg>x /50u rLibName->pData+10
208 0x0909b6c8: vnd.sun.star.expand:$LO_LIB_DIR/abplo.dll
212 - make the debugging more convenient on (native) Windows
213 - check possibilities like WinGDB - http://www.wingdb.com/
214 - or find / write a MSVS / WinDBG extension that can read MinGW debugging
215 symbols natively; more info
216 http://windbg.info/forum/12-symbol-and-source-files-/21-debugging-mingwgcc-built-dll-in-visual-studio.html
219 - so far the make_installer.pl calls makecab.exe, uuidgen.exe, and
220 others; would be best to avoid that if at all possible (using a free
221 cab implementation, part of Wine or something)
223 - if at all possible, the make dev-install installation (with links
224 back to the build) should be done so that it would be directly
225 executable via wine after doing make dev-install :-)
228 - no idea if the entire thing works after the installation at all; I
229 suppose there will be runtime problems to look at too
232 - enable & fix pieces that are currently disabled
233 - --without-myspell-dicts
236 - much of the stuff currently relies on --with-system-*, and
237 consequently on the mingw32-* openSUSE packages; might be good to be
238 able to build with as few dependencies as possible - but that is low
242 - when all the above is sorted out, we should look at the speed of
243 this vs. the speed of the MSVC version
249 iOS is the operating system on Apple's mobile devices. Clearly for a
250 device like the iPad it would not be acceptable to run a normal
251 LibreOffice application with overlapping windows and mouse-oriented
254 It makes sense to use only a part of LibreOffice's code for iOS. Lots
255 of the GUI-oriented code should be left out. iOS apps that want to use
256 the applicable LibreOffice code will handle all their GUI in a
257 platform-dependent manner. How well it will be possible to do such a
258 split remains to be seen.
260 Obviously we want it to be possible to eventually distribute apps
261 using LibreOffice code through the App Store. Technically, one
262 important special aspect of iOS is that apps in the App Store are not
263 allowed to load own dynamic libraries. (System libraries are used in
264 the form of dynamic libraries, just like on Mac OS X, of which iOS is
267 Thus all the libraries in LibreOffice that normally are shared
268 libraries (DLLs on Windows, shared objects (.so) on Linux, dynamic
269 libraries on Mac OS X (.dylib)) must be built as static archives
270 instead. This has some interesting consequences for how UNO is
271 implemented and used.
273 An iOS app is a "bundle" that contains a single executable, In an app
274 using LibreOffice code, that eecutable then congtains the necessary
275 LibreOffice libraries and UNO components statically linked.
277 The Apple tool-chain for iOS cross-building is available only for OS
278 X. In order to be able to run and debug an app on an actual device
279 (and not just the iOS Simulator) you need to be registered in the iOS
282 Here is an autogen.input for iOS (device) using Xcode 4.6, on OS X 10.8:
284 --build=i386-apple-darwin10.7.0
285 --host=arm-apple-darwin10
290 For the iOS Simulator:
292 --build=i386-apple-darwin10.7.0
293 --host=arm-apple-darwin10
294 --enable-ios-simulator
299 Note that you will have to install autoconf and automake yourself
300 before running autogen.sh. They are no longer included in Xcode 4.3
301 and later (not even in the add-on "command line tools").
303 The -mmacosx-version-min=10.7 is necessary when building for the iOS
304 simulator to avoid clang replacing simple calls to fprintf with calls
305 to fwrite$UNIX2003 which Xcode then warns that doesn't exist on iOS.
311 From a technical point of view the core Android OS (the kernel) is
312 Linux, but everything else is different. Unlike iOS, an Android app
313 can use shared objects just fine, so that aspect of UNO doesn't need
314 special handling. Except that there is a silly low limit in the
315 Android dynamic linker on the number of libraries you can dlopen. This
316 is a limitation in user-level (but system-provided and not really
317 replaceable) code, not the kernel.
319 Thus, just like for iOS, also for Android the LibreOffice libraries
320 and UNO components are built as static archives. For Android, those
321 static archives, and any app-specific native code, are linked into one
322 single app-specific shared library, called liblo-native-code.so.
324 For the GUI, the same holds as said above for iOS. The GUI layer needs
325 to be platform-specific, written in Java.
327 Android cross-compilation work has been done mainly on Linux (openSUSE
328 in particular). Earlier also cross-compiling from OS X was tried. The
329 Android cross-compilation tool-chain (the "Native Development Kit", or
330 NDK) is available for Linux, OS X and Windows, but trying to
331 cross-compile LibreOffice from Windows will probably drive you insane.
333 You will also need the Android SDK as full "make" also builds a couple
334 of Android apps where the upper layer is written in Java.
336 Use the "android" tool from the SDK to install the SDK Tools, SDK
337 Platform Tools, the API 14 SDK Platform and the Android Support
338 Library. If you want to run the Android apps in the emulator, you of
339 course need an appropriate system image for that.
341 Here is an autogen.input for Android on ARM when cross-compiling
344 --build=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
348 --with-android-ndk=/home/tml/android-ndk-r8d
349 --with-android-ndk-toolchain-version=4.6
350 --with-android-sdk=/home/tml/adt-bundle-linux/sdk
351 --with-distro=LibreOfficeAndroid
353 And here is an autogen.input for Android on X86:
355 --with-android-ndk=/opt/libreoffice/android-ndk-r8b
356 --with-android-ndk-toolchain-version=4.6
357 --with-android-sdk=/opt/libreoffice/android-sdk-linux
358 --build=i586-suse-linux
360 --with-distro=LibreOfficeAndroidX86
364 There are a couple of (more or less) interactive apps that you can run
365 on the emulator or on a device that use LibreOffice code. Look in
366 android/experimental. DocumentLoader is just a testbench, really for
367 code to load a document (just Writer ones so far) and display one page
368 at a time. LibreOffice4Android is what resulted from a Google Summer
369 of Code project in 2012, a document viewer. desktop is a totally
370 different app, where the actual LibreOffice desktop GUI is present.
371 Note that none of these apps in any way are claimed to be ready for
372 end-users. No "beta testing" offers needed, it is painfully obvious
373 what problems they have.
375 To run some of the apps, do "make install" followed by either "make
376 run" or starting it from Android itself. You most likely want to have
377 an "adb logcat" running in another window.
379 To debug, do manually what "make run" would do and when the app has
380 started, run ndk-gdb.
386 It's now possible to cross-compile LibreOffice for Rapsberry Pi running Raspbian.
387 You will need Raspbian's pkg-config files and system libraries to build against.
388 Available at http://dev-www.libreoffice.org/src/raspbian_rootfs.tar.bz2
389 $ wget http://dev-www.libreoffice.org/src/raspbian_rootfs.tar.bz2
390 $ tar -axf raspbian_rootfs.tar.bz2
392 You can build cross-compiler yourself or get the executables here:
393 $ git clone git://github.com/raspberrypi/tools
394 tools/arm-bcm2708/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-raspbian is known to work.
396 Then create pkg-config wrapper, something like:
397 $ cat > pkg-config-wrapper-host << _EOF
400 SYSROOT=<path-to-raspbian_rootfs>
402 export PKG_CONFIG_DIR=
403 export PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR=\${SYSROOT}/usr/lib/pkgconfig:\${SYSROOT}/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/pkgconfig:\${SYSROOT}/usr/share/pkgconfig
404 export PKG_CONFIG_SYSROOT_DIR=\${SYSROOT}
406 exec pkg-config "\$@"
408 $ chmod +x pkg-config-wrapper-host
409 This does not work with pkg-config 0.23. 0.26 is known to work.
411 And you are ready to build with autogen.input similar to:
413 PKG_CONFIG=<path-to-pkg-config-wrapper-host>
414 CC=<path-to-arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc> --sysroot=<path-to-raspbian_rootfs>
415 CXX=<path-to-arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++> --sysroot=<path-to-raspbian_rootfs>
416 --build=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
417 --host=arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
420 --enable-python=system
421 PYTHON_CFLAGS=-I<path-to-raspbian_rootfs>/usr/include/python2.7
422 PYTHON_LIBS=-lpython2.7
424 JAVAINC=-I<path-to-raspbian_rootfs>/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-armhf/include
425 JAVALIB=-L<path-to-raspbian_rootfs>/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-armhf/jre/lib/arm
427 --with-system-cppunit
431 --with-system-openldap
432 --with-system-openssl
433 --with-system-redland
435 Finally, when you are ready to run the binaries in Raspbian,
436 you may need to get more system libraries.
437 Update your /etc/apt/sources.list as described in
438 http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianRepository and then:
439 $ sudo apt-get update
440 $ sudo apt-get build-dep libreoffice