# Installation on Linux

Assuming your Linux systems has the Perl environment correctly installed (standard on nearly all distros), there will be an administrator command cpan. In a terminal, simply run the appropriate command from the options below for the version you want to install. It will ask the administrator (super user) password and then install everything necessary to run ChordPro.

# Prerequisites

ChordPro requires a number of Perl modules to run. These will be installed automatically by the cpan tool if necessary. However, it may be advantageous to install platform supplied packages if available. On RPM-based systems (RedHat, Fedora, Suze) packages can be installed with dnf or yum. On Debian/Ubuntu-based systems use the apt-get tool.

Module RPM Debian
PDF::API2 perl-PDF-API2 libpdf-api2-perl
Text::Layout perl-Text-Layout libtext-layout-perl
App::Packager perl-App-Packager libapp-packager-perl
File::LoadLines perl-File-LoadLines libfile-loadlines-perl
String::Interpolate::Named perl-String-Interpolate-Named libstring-interpolate-named-perl
Image::Info perl-Image-Info libimage-info-perl

Do not worry if any of these packages are not available, the cpan install process will build them if necessary.

# Helper programs

To support ABC embedding, ChordPro requires two helper programs:

  • abcm2ps
    This proram is used to convert ABC to a vector image.
    Most Linux distributions have prebuilt packages available.
    Otherwise, you can find it on SourceForge.

  • convert
    This is part of the ImageMagick suite of graphical manipulation tools. It is used to convert the vector image to a suitable bitmapped format for embedding.
    Most Linux distributions have prebuilt packages available.
    Otherwise, you can download it from the ImageMagick web site.

# GUI (graphical) interface version

There is one critical prerequisite that must be installed manually: the perl wxWidgets library.

For Debian/Ubuntu-based systems:

sudo apt-get install libwx-perl

For RPM-based systems:

sudo dnf install perl-Wx

After installing the Wx library, you can install chordpro with:

sudo cpan install chordpro

This will install the command line version chordpro as well as the GUI version wxchordpro.

Next, to open the program, run wxchordpro at a terminal prompt. You will get a file open dialog. To close the program, you can press Cancel and terminate the program with File > Exit.

If your system uses Open Desktop compliant desktop icons, you can set up a start icon for ChordPro on the Desktop and in the system applications menu by executing the script setup_desktop.sh in the ChordPro resource directory. This will also associate files with extension .cho, .chordpro, .chopro, and .crd with the ChordPro program.

# CLI (command-line) interface version

sudo cpan install chordpro

To check for successful install, run chordpro --version. That should return a result similar to

This is ChordPro version 6.000

(The version number may be different.)

# Running Chordpro

Whether using GUI or CLI version, you may proceed to Getting Started.