Chosing the proper binary for Centos7 or ScientificLinux7

[georgios_doumas]

Hello all. I am new to SFML , and I intend to use it on Scientific Linux 7.4 , so I went  to the tutorial "SFML and Linux" and started reading. When I realized that my distribution does not have a package to do an easy :     sudo yum install <sfml-package-name>
(once again I envy Debian for providing one!)
I thought "ok , I will install from source" , but when I start reading "Compiling SFML with CMake" , and after I finished with downloading as much as I could of the dependencies (I had to be creative about the names of the packages, and always preferred to download more to be on the safe side) , then I realized that the screenshots for Cmake were for Windows machines. So I thought to avoid continuing, because I would never be sure if what I do is correct.
And thus I decided to use the precompiled binaries of the Download page. I started with 2.4.2 , downloaded it and untared it , and the step of
g++ -c main.cpp -I<sfml-install-path>/include
was OK but  but when I tried to do the next step
g++ main.o -o sfml-app -L<sfml-install-path>/lib -lsfml-graphics -lsfml-window -lsfml-system
I got complains about libjpeg.so.8 needed , then I downloaded a relevant package from www.rpmfind.net  ( I found an .rpm from opensuse )
but still I got another complain about GLIBCXX_3.4.20 , so it seems that the version of libstdc++ that centos7.4 and Scientific Linux have, can provide only up to GLIBCXX_3.4.19 , and could not install a separate version of libstdc++ from rpmfind.net ( I downloaded one version from rpmfind.net, coming from Fedora , but the command rpm -i failed due to dependency missing, so I gave up).
Then I started thinking "maybe I can use an older version of sfml that will require versions of packages that are already installed on my system. Lets see how far back do I have to go.."
The short answer is : for Centos7.4 / ScientificLinux7.4 , you need sfml2.2
Here are some instruction for the non-experienced users:
Open a terminal and go to your Downloads dir
cd ~/Downloads
wget  https://www.sfml-dev.org/files/SFML-2.2-linux-gcc-64-bit.tar.gz
ls -l
cd /opt
tar -xvzf /home/yourusername/Downloads/SFML-2.2-linux-gcc-64-bit.tar.gz
ls -l SFML-2.2
cd ~/Documents
Use a text editor (bluefish is a good text editor suitable for programming) to create the file main.cpp
that exists on https://www.sfml-dev.org/tutorials/2.4/start-linux.php
and then the commands to compile and build will look like this :
g++ -c main.cpp -I/opt/SFML-2.2/include
g++ main.o -o sfml-app -L/opt/SFML-2.2/lib  -lsfml-graphics -lsfml-window -lsfml-system
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/SFML-2.2/lib  &&  ./sfml-app
As a helpful extra step you can now create a symbolic link so that you do not have to put the -I/opt/SFML-2.2/include anymore :
sudo ln -s /opt/SFML-2.2/include/SFML/   /usr/local/include/SFML
and now the 1st line of the source file main.cpp
#include <SFML/Graphics.hpp>
will look as usual to the standard place /usr/local/include and it will find a directory named SFML/
and under this directory it will find the file Graphics.hpp
So you can just compile with  the command :
g++ -c main.cpp

I tried to make sym links for the /opt/SFML-2.2/lib into the /usr/local/lib but the command
g++ main.o -o sfml-app -lsfml-graphics -lsfml-window -lsfml-system
complains. I will try to simply copy files from /opt/SFML-2.2/lib to the /usr/local/lib

So the easy way is to avoid creating symlinks in the /usr/local/lib and just copy the whole directory:
sudo cp  -r  /opt/SFML-2.2/lib/  /usr/local/
and you have what the tutorial mentions as a "standard path"

[Laurent]

Just compile from source, really. The screenshots show cmake-gui in action, which is cross-platform. But on Linux you can often get a successful build with just "cmake . && make && make install" and don't even bother with the tutorial.