Installing PMbrowser

You can install from source or use one of the provided binaries. Currently, for Linux, an executable is available as well as a DEB package. For Windows (64bit only) and macOS (minimum version 10.14) installers are available.

Alternatively, you can build from source.

Installing on Windows

Download the installer PMbrowser-<version>-win64.msi from the GitHub repository release page: https://github.com/ChrisHal/PMbrowser/releases .

There is no need to install any libraries of the Qt framework, since the installer comes with all files necessary for installing and running the program.

An entry will be created in the start menu.

Inside the program folder PM browser under Program Files you will find an offline version of the documentation in the share/doc folder.

Installing on Linux

using flatpak

The is the recommended installation method on Linux.

PM browser is hosted on flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/de.halaszovich.PMbrowser

If your system is set up accordingly (see https://flatpak.org/setup/ for information on setting up flatpak), you can install the flatpak with this command:

flatpak install flathub de.halaszovich.PMbrowser

Or simply use this link: https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/de.halaszovich.PMbrowser.flatpakref

using DEB package

Download the installer PMbrowser-<version>-win64.deb from the GitHub repository release page: https://github.com/ChrisHal/PMbrowser/releases . Use the command sudo dpkg -i `PMbrowser-<version>-win64.deb to install.

Your distribution needs to provide packages for the Qt libraries, version 6. If it does not, you can use the flatpak (see using flatpak).

Documentation will be installed in /usr/share/doc/QtPMbrowser by default. The executable QtPMbrowser in /usr/bin .

Now, you can start PMbrowser with QtPMbrowser & from a terminal.

Starting with Version 2.2.1, you should find PM browser under Applications, too.

Installing on macOS

Download the ZIP-archive PMbrowser-<version>-Darwin.zip from the GitHub repository release page: https://github.com/ChrisHal/PMbrowser/releases and unzip it. Since the app is not (yet) notarized (which does cost money) by Apple, you must convince macOS to open it. Information on how to do this can be found here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/mac-help/mh40616/mac

Building from Source

Since version 2.1, the build process has been unified such that cmake is used on all target systems.

Prerequisits

You will need to install the usual build tools including cmake and Qt-Library version 6.4 or newer. To build the documentation, you need sphinx and sphinx_rtd_theme. (Usually, these can be installed via pip, if python is installed.)

On most Linux distributions , Qt is provided as a package, e.g. qt6-base-dev for Ubuntu.

For Windows and macOS the Qt developer tools need to be installed. You can get them from Qt.

On Linux, there is an obscure bug in the Qt-libraries that can lead to the error

error while loading shared libraries: libQt6Core.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This can be solved by this command:

sudo strip --remove-section=.note.ABI-tag /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt6Core.so.6

Build commands

Usually, these commands should work to build and install from the terminal:

git clone https://github.com/ChrisHal/PMbrowser.git
mkdir PMbrowser_build
cd PMbrowser_build
cmake ../PMbrowser -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build . --config Release
cmake --install . --config Release

You might need to set the cmake variable CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to your Qt directory. You might find this easier to do using cmake-gui .

By default, the documentation will not be build / installed. You have to set the BUILD_DOCS option for this when configuring cmake:

cmake ../PMbrowser -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DBUILD_DOCS=on