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    <h1><a name="installation">libvirt Installation</a></h1>

    <ul id="toc"></ul>

    <h2><a name="compiling">Compiling a release tarball</a></h2>

    <p>
      libvirt uses the standard configure/make/install steps:
    </p>

    <pre>
      $ gunzip -c libvirt-x.x.x.tar.gz | tar xvf -
      $ cd libvirt-x.x.x
      $ ./configure</pre>

    <p>
      The <i>configure</i> script can be given options to change its default
      behaviour.
    </p>

    <p>
      To get the complete list of the options it can take, pass it the
      <i>--help</i> option like this:
    </p>

    <pre>
      $ ./configure <i>--help</i></pre>

    <p>
      When you have determined which options you want to use (if any),
      continue the process.
    </p>

    <p>
      Note the use of <b>sudo</b> with the <i>make install</i> command
      below.  Using sudo is only required when installing to a location your
      user does not have write access to.  Installing to a system location
      is a good example of this.
    </p>

    <p>
      If you are installing to a location that your user <i>does</i> have write
      access to, then you can instead run the <i>make install</i> command
      without putting <b>sudo</b> before it.
    </p>

    <pre>
      $ ./configure <i>[possible options]</i>
      $ make
      $ <b>sudo</b> <i>make install</i></pre>

    <p>
      At this point you <b>may</b> have to run ldconfig or a similar utility
      to update your list of installed shared libs.
    </p>

    <h2><a name="building">Building from a GIT checkout</a></h2>

    <p>
      The libvirt build process uses GNU autotools, so after obtaining a
      checkout it is necessary to generate the configure script and Makefile.in
      templates using the <code>autogen.sh</code> command, passing the extra
      arguments as for configure. As an example, to do a complete build and
      install it into your home directory run:
    </p>

    <pre>
      $ ./autogen.sh --prefix=$HOME/usr --enable-compile-warnings=error
      $ make
      $ <b>sudo</b> make install</pre>
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