Compile TeXmacs on the Raspberry Pi

The following is a step by step guide to install the required tools to compile TeXmacs yourself from source and install it. Theis guide was written for the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS from December 2020. It will work on version 3, 4 and 400 of the RaspberryPi.

Start by opening a terminal and installing the required components to compile by entering:

sudo apt install build-essential libfreetype-dev libltdl-dev \
     libgmp-dev qt4-default qt4-config

Now, that everything is ready to download and build we start by making a building directory:

mkdir texmacs-builddir

Change the working directory to it:

cd texmacs-builddir

TeXmacs depends on a Guile, so we need to build guile first. For this enter the following commands. Each step might take some time depending on your internet connection and the exact model of the Raspberry Pi.

wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-1.8.8.tar.gz
tar xzf guile-1.8.8.tar.gz
cd guile-1.8.8
./configure --disable-error-on-warning
make -j 4
sudo make install

The last step will ask for your password to install guile to your system.

Now, we can go on to get and compile TeXmacs

cd ..
wget www.texmacs.org/Download/ftp/tmftp/source/TeXmacs-1.99.16-src.tar.gz
tar xzf TeXmacs-1.99.16-src.tar.gz
cd TeXmacs-1.99.16-src/
./configure --enable-qtpipes
make -j 4
sudo make install

Again the last step will ask for your password.

Now, you should be able to run TeXmacs either from the terminal by entering

texmacs

or from the normal menu.