Building Blender/Linux/OpenSUSE
< Building Blender | Linux
Building Blender on OpenSUSE
Quick Setup
The following instructions will create a Blender build in a blender-git folder in your home directory.
Install Initial Packages
Ensure both Python3 and Git are installed.
sudo zypper update
sudo zypper install python3 git
Download Sources
Download the latest source code from projects.blender.org.
mkdir ~/blender-git
cd ~/blender-git
git clone https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender.git
For additional information on using Git with Blender's sources, see: Tools/Git
Install Basic Building Environment
Run this command to install basic building dependencies.
cd ~/blender-git/blender/
./build_files/build_environment/install_linux_packages.py
Some commands in this script requires sudo, so you'll be likely be asked for your password.
Alternatively, you can also install all basic dependencies manually with the package manager.
sudo zypper update
sudo zypper install gcc gcc-c++ git subversion make cmake libX11-devel libXxf86vm-devel libXi-devel libXcursor-devel libXrandr-devel libXinerama-devel Mesa-libGL-devel Mesa-libEGL-devel
Download Libraries
For Intel and AMD Linux systems, we recommend using precompiled libraries. These are the quickest way to get a feature complete Blender build and can be downloaded as follows.
These libraries are built on Rocky8 for VFX reference platform compatibility, but they work fine on other Linux distributions.
mkdir ~/blender-git/lib
cd ~/blender-git/lib
svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/linux_x86_64_glibc_228
To use system packages, see Advanced Setup.
Update and Build
Get latest source code and add-ons, and build. These commands can be used for the first build, and repeated whenever you want to update to the latest version.
cd ~/blender-git/blender
make update
make
After the build finished, you will find blender ready to run in ~/blender-git/build_linux/bin.
If building fails after an update, it sometimes helps to remove the ~/blender-git/build_linux folder to get a completely clean build.
Branches
With the quick setup instructions the main branch will be built by default, which contains the latest Blender version under development.
To build another branch or a pull request, first checkout the branch and then run make update to update the add-ons, libraries and tests to match.
cd ~/blender-git/blender
git checkout <branch-name>
make update
make
Depending on how big the changes are compared to the main branch, it may be necessary to remove the build folder ~/blender-git/build_linux. Otherwise the build folder may still refer to libraries from another branch.
Advanced Setup
Automatic Dependency Installation
When not using precompiled libraries, the preferred way to install dependencies under Linux is to use the install_linux_packages.py
script in the Blender sources. It will try to install system packages for all known dependencies, required or optional.
It currently supports Debian (and derivatives like Ubuntu), Fedora, Suse and Arch distributions. It is executed as follows.
cd ~/blender-git/blender
./build_files/build_environment/install_linux_packages.py --all
Some commands in this script requires sudo, so you'll be likely be asked for your password.
For unrecognized distributions, it will only print a list of the dependencies.
Building with Precompiled libraries and System libraries
In case both precompiled and system libraries are available, by default CMake will use the pre-compiled ones. To force it to ignore the precompiled libraries and search for system ones, CMakeWITH_LIBS_PRECOMPILED option must be disabled. |
Portable Builds
The above instructions install packages through the system package manager. This makes it possible to share packages between Blender and other software, however the resulting builds will generally not work on other computers.
When using the precompiled libraries, builds are portable and can be shared with others. These libraries are built from source, and this system can also be used to create your own portable libraries.
Running make deps will build libraries in ../lib/linux_x86_64_glibc_228, which will be automatically picked up when building Blender itself.
Besides the libraries, the GLIBC version of the system affects portability. Builds will only run on Linuxes with the same or higher GLIBC version. Official builds are made with RHEL 8 and glibc 2.28.
Manual CMake Setup
If you want to have more control over your build configuration or have multiple build directories for a single source directory. You can follow these steps.
Typically useful for developers, who build frequently.
CMake Setup
Now you have to choose a location for CMake build files, currently in-source builds in Blender aren't supported.
Out-of-source build
By doing an "out-of-source" build you create a CMake's directory aside from ~/blender-git/blender, for example ~/blender-git/build:
mkdir ~/blender-git/build
cd ~/blender-git/build
cmake ../blender
This will generate makefiles in the build directory (~/blender-git/build).
Important
As said above, in-source-builds where you build blender from the source code directory are not supported.
If CMake finds a CMakeCache.txt in the source code directory, it uses that instead of using ~/blender-git/build/CMakeCache.txt.
If you have tried to do an in-source build, you should remove any CMakeCache.txt from the source code directory before actually running the out-of-source build:
rm ~/blender-git/blender/CMakeCache.txt
Building Blender
After changes have been done and you have generated the makefiles, you can compile using the make command inside the build directory:
cd ~/blender-git/build
make
make install
Also notice the install target is used, this will copy scripts and documentation into ~/blender-git/build/bin
For future builds you can simply update the repository and re-run make.
cd ~/blender-git/blender
make update
cd ~/blender-git/build
make
make install
Build Options
By default Blender builds will be similar to official releases. Many Build Options are available for debugging, faster builds, and to enable or disable various features.
System Installation
Portable installation is the default where scripts and data files will be copied into the build ~/blender-git/build/bin directory and can be moved to other systems easily.
To install Blender into the system directories, a system installation can be used instead. Disable WITH_INSTALL_PORTABLE to install into CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX which uses a typical Unix FHS layout: bin/, share/blender/, man/ etc.
Optimize Rebuilds
Now that you can build Blender and run Blender, there are changes you can make which greatly increase the speed of build times.
Use one of the CMake configuration editors (ccmake or cmake-gui), see Editing CMake Options
For really fast rebuilds you can disable Every option with the WITH_ prefix, except for WITH_PYTHON which is needed for the UI. This speeds up linking and gives a smaller binary.
Remove the files created by make install since they will become stale.
However, Blender still needs to be able to find its scripts or you will have a very minimalist looking interface.
This can be solved by linking the source directory to your Blender binary path so copying isn't needed and scripts are always up to date.
rm -r ~/blender-git/build/bin/*.*
ln -s ~/blender-git/blender/release ~/blender-git/build/bin/
For convenient access, create this symlink to run blender from the source directory:
ln -s ~/blender-git/build/bin/blender ~/blender-git/blender/blender.bin
You can add any files created this way to ~/blender-git/blender/.git/info/exclude so they won't count as untracked files for git. Add your local files here, instead of in .gitignore, because .gitignore is also committed and will affect everyone else.
Troubleshooting
Non-Default Compiler (CUDA Compatibility)
At the time of writing NVCC-12 is not compatible with GCC-13, if your distribution uses a newer GCC, and you wish to use Cycles with CUDA, you will need to compile with GCC-12 as well.
Running make with the following arguments can be used to specify a different compiler version:
make CC=gcc-12 CPP=g++-12 CXX=g++-12 LD=g++-12