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WINDOWS - Installing GNU LilyPond on Windows

This document explains how to install the binary release for windows on a Microsoft Windows 95, 98, NT or 2000 machine.

This release is a free extra service of the developers to assist windows users. Please remember that we (the developers) rather dislike windows, and none of us use it. Don't complain to us that installing LilyPond is too difficult; rather, if you know something about your Windows, send us code that works better (see compiling).

Windows binary setup

Apart from LilyPond itself, you need Cygwin, GUILE, Python, and a TeX installation, but all this software be installed by running setup.exe:

LilyPond
Download and run setup.exe to install LilyPond.

This will install the minimal set of cygwin tools needed to run LilyPond.

As of version 1.3.150, you also have the option to install MiKTeX, Python and GSView from this installer, which is recommended. If you choose to install these by hand (see below), make sure to install them before you install LilyPond, otherwise your LilyPond setup will be broken.

If you already have cygwin installed, don't worry: nothing will be installed twice. To expand on this minimal set, click here, or visit a Cygwin mirror site.

Windows running setup

If you're lucky, after running setup.exe you're all set up.

Open a LilyPond shell (or any bash shell), and type

lilypond --help

If you don't see something similar to

Usage: lilypond [OPTION]... [FILE]...

Typeset music and or play MIDI from FILE

LilyPond is a music typesetter.  It produces beautiful sheet music
using a high level description file as input.  LilyPond is part of
the GNU Project.

Options:
  -h,--help             this help
[..]

you should try adding /usr/lilypond-x.y.z/bin to your PATH, do:

PATH=/usr/lilypond-1.3.147/bin:$PATH

and try again.

Additional software

LilyPond needs a number of software packages to be really useful. These are included in the binary setup program (see above).

If you choose to install this additional software yourself, make sure you install LilyPond last, otherwise the LilyPond setup will be broken. Also note that this means that you will probably need to fix some PATH and TEX environment variables yourself. If you think you can handle that, you may do so, but don't complain if it doesn't work.

These software packages are included in the LilyPond installation:

A full TeX installation.
Currently, only MikTeX is supported. Download and install MikTeX, or visit www.miktex.org.
Ghostview.
You can use GSView-2.6. This old package has two advantages. It has gsview and ghostscript bundeled, and it doesn't popup Register Now|Cancel windows all the time. It doesn't work together with Yap to display PostScript specials.

Click here to install GSView-2.6 (GhostView for Windows), or visit ftp.cs.wisc.edu.

You can also use the newer versions GSView-3.6 and GhostScript-6.50 If you install both these packages, Yap will display PostScript specials. You get annoying Register Now|Cancel popups, though.

Click here for GSview and Click here for GhostScript. ftp.cs.wisc.edu. or visit the Ghostview and GSview site.

Python
Click here to install Python-1.5.2, or visit www.python.org.

We have not tried using newer versions than 1.5.2.

[TODO:

* emacs-mode installation, figure out and describe proper emacs-on-cygwin setup.

* talk about /etc/profile.d/lilypond-profile.sh

* GUILE errors, simple guile test

* (La)TEX errors, simple tex test

]

Go back to index of LilyPond.

Please send GNU LilyPond questions and comments to gnu-music-discuss@gnu.org.

Please send comments on these web pages to (address unknown)

Copyright (c) 1997--2001 Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.


This page was built from LilyPond-1.4.2 by

<(address unknown)>, Fri Jun 1 16:16:19 2001 CEST.