Installation on Linux

First of all, check if there is a prebuilt package available for your system.

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. For example on a Ubuntu system:

$ sudo apt-get install chordpro

CPAN install

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 is strongly advised 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.

The cpan tool requires build tools make, gcc and g++. Traditionally these were always installed on Linux systems but on some modern Linux distributions these must be installed explicitly. So check this first!

These modules should be available as prebuilt packages:

Module RPM Debian
PDF::API2 perl-PDF-API2 libpdf-api2-perl
Object::Pad perl-Object-Pad libobject-pad-perl
Image::Info perl-Image-Info libimage-info-perl
JSON::PP perl-JSON-PP libjson-pp-perl
JSON::XS perl-JSON-XS libjson-xs-perl
File::HomeDir perl-File-HomeDir libfile-homedir-perl
Data::Printer perl-Data-Printer libdata-printer-perl
Storable perl-Storable libstorable-perl
Pod::Usage perl-Pod-Usage libpod-usage-perl

These modules may be available as prebuilt packages:

Module RPM Debian
Text::Layout perl-Text-Layout libtext-layout-perl
JavaScript::QuickJS perl-JavaScript-QuickJS libjavascript-quickjs-perl
File::LoadLines perl-File-LoadLines libfile-loadlines-perl
String::Interpolate::Named perl-String-Interpolate-Named libstring-interpolate-named-perl

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

GUI (graphical) interface version

If you are going to use ChordPro on the command line only, you can skip to the next section.

For the GUI 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 higher.)

Running Chordpro

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