Setup on Linux

This is a brief guide to how you can get novelWriter running on a Linux computer. There are currently no packaged version of novelWriter for Linux, so it is recommended that you just extract the source to a practical location on your system and run the setup.py script.

Running from Source

To run novelWriter from source, download the latest source package from the release page on GitHub or the main website, or if you have git running on your computer, you can also clone the repository.

Step 1: Installing Dependencies

The dependencies of novelWriter are generally available from Linux distro repositories. For Debian and Ubuntu, they can be installed with:

sudo apt install python3-pyqt5 python3-lxml python3-enchant

If you prefer to install dependencies via PyPi, or the repository dependencies are out of date, you can install them with:

pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt

Step 2: Install Package (Optional)

You can install novelWriter to the correct location for Python packages with:

./setup.py install

This is equivalent to what the pip installer does. It puts novelWriter in the location on your system where Python packages are usually kept. This is not really the best suited location for a GUI application like novelWriter, so you may instead copy the entire source to a suiteable location yourself.

By default, this command installs novelWriter for the current user only. To install for all users, run the script with the sudo command.

This should install novelWriter to either ~/.local/bin/novelWriter if installed for local user only, or to /usr/local/bin/novelWriter if installed for all users.

Step 3: Create Launcher Icons

To set up the novelWriter desktop launcher, the icons, and the project file association, run:

./setup.py xdg-install

By default, these commands install novelWriter and its icons for the current user only. To install for all users, run the script with the sudo command.

Tip

All options of the setup script can be listed with: ./setup.py help.