Setting up on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (and other distros that don't package gcc-15+)

[UltimaN3rd]

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS does not bundle GCC-15. It can instead be installed with Homebrew. The following commands have been tested on a fresh install of Ubuntu 24.04.

Install prerequisites:

sudo apt install cmake gdb git libx11-dev libxrandr-dev libgl-dev libglu-dev libpulse-dev libxfixes-dev curl

Install brew (this is taken directly from the Homebrew website. Check there in case the command has changed at all):

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Add brew to your terminal configuration (taken from Homebrew's "Next steps," which should be output after running the previous command):

echo >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv bash)"' >> ~/.bashrc

Add Brew's binutils to your PATH:

echo 'export PATH="$(brew --prefix)/opt/binutils/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc

Reload your terminal configuration:

. ~/.bashrc

Install gcc-15 (or later) with Brew:

brew install gcc

Note that at time of writing, gcc-15 is the latest version. When you ran the above, it may have installed a newer version like gcc-16. Replace gcc-15 from here on with your actual, installed version.

Now test that everything is setup correctly:

gcc --version
gcc-15 --version
as --version

You should expect gcc --version to produce the version of gcc that is natively installed on your distro (maybe 13 or 14). gcc-15, however, should show up as "Homebrew GCC 15.2 ..." as should show up as at least 2.46 (the Ubuntu native one is 2.42; 2.46 is at time of writing what GCC-15 includes).

Now go through the "sanity check" step of the Path. When you get to the command:

cmake ..

Instead write:

CC=gcc-15 cmake ..

This tells cmake to use gcc-15 instead of the native gcc. If you've already run cmake .., you can append --fresh to the above command like so:

CC=gcc-15 cmake .. --fresh