Building Foliate on Ubuntu 24.10: Dependency Challenges and Solutions

[ajsb85]

Hi everyone,

I recently tried building Foliate from source on Ubuntu 24.10 and ran into some dependency challenges. Thought I'd share my experience and the solutions I found in case anyone else encounters similar issues.

Problem:

Initially, the build failed because Meson couldn't find several dependencies, even though I had the gjs, gtk4, libadwaita, and webkitgtk-6.0 packages installed.

Solution:

After some troubleshooting, I realized that I needed to install the development packages (-dev) for these dependencies as well. Here's the complete list of packages I installed to resolve the issue:

sudo apt install gjs gir1.2-adw-1 gir1.2-webkit-6.0 \
                 espeak-ng speech-dispatcher \
                 tracker-miner-fs gir1.2-tracker-3.0 \
                 meson pkg-config gettext \
                 libgjs-dev libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev \
                 libwebkitgtk-6.0-dev

Once I installed these packages, the build proceeded without any errors.

Additional Notes:

• If you're using Ubuntu 24.10 or later, you can simply install Foliate from the official repositories using sudo apt install foliate. This is the easiest and recommended method.
• If you encounter "Permission denied" errors during installation, make sure to use sudo with the meson and ninja commands.
• If you have any further questions or encounter different issues, feel free to ask!

Hope this helps!