Quick guide to compiling Freemind on an XP system

Ver 1.1 – 11 December 2003

 Robert J. Alexander – Rome – Italy

(For any corrections or simple thanks 8-> my email is bob and my provider is ngi.it)

 

I am writing this very simple guide to compiling Freemind because of my gratitude to the authors and contributors of the Freemind OSS project which I find really great. Keep up the good work my friends!

This guide will try helping you in the setup of a complete development suite to be able to download and compile Freemind in it’s very latest CVS source release.

This setup will enable us to have a wonderful Java development environment (Eclipse 3.0) which will enable us to use the repository where Freemind’s code is stored, download it and compile it from scratch using the Java System Development Kit (JDK or Java DSK) we will download.

First of all we will need to download some product files:

  1. Java 2 SDK (JDK)
  2. Eclipse

The Java SDK will give you the Java compiler and libraries we need to compile Freemind.

Here are the instructions to download and install the Java 2 SDK.

Eclipse is another Open Source Software (OSS) project which gives you an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) ready to work on Java projects (but that can be extended to other environment via plugins).

Here are the instructions to download and install Eclipse.

We will not need to download Freemind’s source since Eclipse will do this for us. We will download a “bleeding edge” version of the sources from the central CVS repository where it lives and compile it from scratch.

Here are the instructions to download Freemind from the CVS with Eclipse .

Now the last task which lies ahead is compiling Freemind from the source which Eclipse has just downloaded from the project's CVS (currently on sourceforge.net).

And finally here are the instructions to compile Freemind in Eclipse.