PCSX2 Documentation/Compiling on Linux

The following is a guide on how to obtain and compile the PCSX2 source code on the Linux platform.

For a more in-depth guide on the PCSX2 build process, please refer to this guide here:

• PCSX2 Documentation/PCSX2 Build Scripts

Obtaining the Source Code

PCSX2 is hosted on GitHub, a website where people can contribute to each others' programming projects using the Git version control software. GitHub is essentially just a showcase for your projects, to actually work on them you need to download and install Git itself.

• Arch Linux: # pacman -S git
• Debian: # apt-get install git
• Fedora: # dnf install git

Next you are going to want to create a directory on your machine for the PCSX2 code to live in. For this example, let's say the directory you create is /home/your/workspace. You are going to want clone the remote PCSX2 repository like so:

<source lang="bash"> $ cd /home/your/workspace $ git clone https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2.git --recurse </source>

You are now making a copy of the remote repository into your own directory.

Setting up the Build System

PCSX2 uses the cmake build system to create project files and other things for multiple platforms, and GCC or clang to compile on the linux platform.

Most of the information below is currently out of date. PCSX2 currently only compiles on 64 bits, not 32 bits, and the libraries are likely out of date as well. This will be updated, but for the moment, if you want to compile it, you can do so like this:

Compiling a release build.

Compiler/build system	command
gcc/make	mkdir build && cd build && cmake --preset=gcc-release .. && make
gcc/ninja	mkdir build && cd build && cmake --preset=gcc-release-ninja .. && ninja
clang/ninja/lld	mkdir build && cd build && cmake --preset=clang-release .. && ninja

And run bin/pcsx2-qt .

For reference, here is the current list of presets:

Name	Description
ninja-multi	Generates ninja build files for debug/devel/and release builds for gcc.
gcc-debug	For making a debug build with gcc and make.
gcc-devel	For making a development build with gcc and make.
gcc-release	For making a release build with gcc and make. Does not have LTO.
gcc-debug-ninja	For making a debug build with gcc and ninja. (ninja builds faster then make.)
gcc-devel-ninja	For making a development build with gcc and ninja.(ninja builds faster then make.)
gcc-release-ninja	For making a release build with gcc and ninja. Does not have LTO. (ninja builds faster then make.)
clang-debug	For making a debug build with clang and ninja. (Fastest builds.)
clang-devel	For making a development build with clang and ninja. (Fastest builds.)
clang-release	For making a release build with clang and ninja. (This one has lto, so has the slowest build time.)

Everything below this point is outdated.

32-bit compile on 64-bit machines

Arch

If you are running 64-bit Arch Linux, you are going to need to enable access to the multilib repository, so you can obtain 32-bit libraries. You can do this by uncommenting the following lines in /etc/pacman.conf: <source lang="apache"> [Multilib] Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist </source>

Then, just run the following:

# pacman -S cmake gcc

Fedora

It is important to note that you do not need to install gcc-c++.i686. Installing this package could lead to some packages being downgraded, resulting in a broken g++ compiler.

The required packages to compile PCSX2 can be installed with:

# dnf install gcc-g++ cmake glibc-devel.i686 libstdc++-devel.i686

Installing the Dependencies

PCSX2 relies on a number of 3rd party software libraries, so you are going to need to obtain those before you can compile the source code. Here's a non-exhaustive list of these dependencies.

<source lang="bash"> lib32-alsa-lib lib32-bzip2 lib32-libjpeg lib32-glew lib32-nvidia-cg-toolkit lib32-portaudio lib32-sdl lib32-libaio lib32-wxgtk3 lib32-soundtouch lib32-libpcap lib32-zlib lib32-libsamplerate sparsehash fmt </source>

When generating the build configuration, CMake will first attempt to use pre-bundled versions of some of these packages to ensure PCSX2 is built against the most suitable version of its dependencies. In order to install these pre-packaged dependencies, run the following commands at the top-level directory of the PCSX2 git repository you just cloned

<source> $ cd ./pcsx2 $ git submodule --init --recursive $ mkdir -p ./build && cd ./build </source>

Please note you may still need to install 32-bit versions of some of these libraries yourself.

Fedora

To obtain all the required dependencies for 32-bit compile on Fedora, reference their i686 architecture version, like so:

# dnf install alsa-lib-devel.i686 libpcap-devel.i686 libxml2-devel.i686 freetype-devel.i686 \
  xz-devel.i686 mesa-libGL-devel.i686 libpng-devel.i686 libaio-devel.i686 systemd-devel.i686 \
  portaudio-devel.i686 soundtouch-devel.i686 SDL2-devel.i686 harfbuzz-devel.i686 wxGTK3-devel.i686 \
  gtk3.i686 gtk3-devel.i686 glib2-devel.i686 libsamplerate.i686 libsamplerate-devel.i686 gdk-pixbuf2-devel.i686

Note: this list of dependencies was last verified on a Fedora 33 (x86_64) installation.

Compiling the Source

Note: On Arch Linux, you may need to explicitly specify to cmake where to find the config executables. You can do that by adding these flags into the build script:

<source lang="bash"> -DwxWidgets_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE='/usr/bin/wx-config32-2.8' -DwxWidgets_wxrc_EXECUTABLE='/usr/bin/wxrc32-2.8' </source>

Now that we have installed all external libraries, it is time to compile the source code! To do that, we are going to run a shell script which automates the entire process.
<source lang="bash"> $ cd /home/you/workspace/pcsx2 $ sh build.sh </source>

If omit any of the libraries or headers specified above (or other, newer dependencies not included here), CMake will abort, your compiler may skip certain parts of the overall build or the linker may fail to link all the dependencies into the final PCSX2 executable. The output from any one of these tools should be able to tell the dependencies you're missing.

Running the Binary

This process may take several minutes. Once it has finished, you should be able to run the pcsx2 binary, which should've been output to the bin/ directory.

<source lang="bash">$ ./bin/PCSX2</source>

The most straightforward to invoke the PCSX2 binary is via the Linux wrapper script provided in the same folder, which should be run from the top-level directory:

<source lang="bash"> $ chmod +x ./bin/PCSX2-linux.sh $ ./bin/PCSX2-linux.sh </source>

Additional external links

• PCSX2 for Debian/Ubuntu
• PCSX2 for Archlinux
• PCSX2 for Fedora
• PCSX2 for Gentoo