Jacob Stanley « Blog
Written by Jacob Stanley on October 20, 2010
This is a quick to note to myself about what I had to do to install Gtk2Hs 0.11 on Windows, but others might find it useful as well.
Download the GTK+ all-in-one bundle from here. I used 2.16 because I had some problems with libpng [1] and zlib [2] when I tried 2.22.
Extract it somewhere without spaces in the name, and add the \bin directory to your PATH. I extracted the bundle to c:\gtk-2.16 so I had to add c:\gtk-2.16\bin to my PATH.
You can check you’ve done this right by running pkg-config from the command line. You should get back something similar to this:
> pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0
-mms-bitfields -Ic:/gtk-2.16/include/gtk-2.0 -Ic:/gtk-2.16/lib...
Add the Haskell Platform’s \mingw\bin directory to your PATH. This was C:\Program Files\Haskell Platform\2010.2.0.0\mingw\bin in my case. I found this was necessary because the Gtk2Hs install requires cpp.exe, the C preprocessor.
Once you have all the prerequisites set up, installation is simply a cabal install away.
> cabal update
> cabal install gtk2hs-buildtools
> cabal install gtk
You can try out your newly installed Gtk2Hs with the Hello World program from the documentation.
import Graphics.UI.Gtk
main :: IO ()
main = do
initGUI
window <- windowNew
button <- buttonNew
set window [ containerBorderWidth := 10,
containerChild := button ]
set button [ buttonLabel := "Hello World" ]
onClicked button (putStrLn "Hello World")
onDestroy window mainQuit
widgetShowAll window
mainGUII was able to run the code above using runghc without any issues.
> runghc Hello.hs
This gives us a window which is using the vanilla GTK+ theme. This looks a bit out of place on Windows and it’s easy to fix. Just add a gtkrc to your \etc\gtk-2.0 directory (for me c:\gtk-2.16\etc\gtk-2.0\gtkrc) with the following contents:
gtk-theme-name = "MS-Windows"
After adding a gtkrc, running our demo yields a much nicer looking window.
1. If you’re trying to install using the GTK+ 2.22 bundle and you encounter this error:
setup.exe: gtk-0.11.2: library-dirs: c:/devel/dist/win32/libpng-1.4.3-1/lib
doesn't exist or isn't a directory
It can easily be fixed by creating an empty directory in the location that setup.exe is searching for: c:\devel\dist\win32\libpng-1.4.3-1\lib
2. Unfortunately, solving the libpng problem didn’t help me. I found that I was able to build and install the gtk package using cabal. The problem was that any programs which I built failed with an error about deflateSetHeader not being exported from zlib1.dll when I tried to run them.