2.2 Downloading and installing

GnuTLS is available for download at: http://www.gnutls.org/download.html

GnuTLS uses a development cycle where even minor version numbers indicate a stable release and a odd minor version number indicate a development release. For example, GnuTLS 1.6.3 denote a stable release since 6 is even, and GnuTLS 1.7.11 denote a development release since 7 is odd.

GnuTLS depends on Libnettle, and you will need to install it before installing GnuTLS. Libnettle is available from http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/nettle/. Don’t forget to verify the cryptographic signature after downloading source code packages.

The package is then extracted, configured and built like many other packages that use Autoconf. For detailed information on configuring and building it, refer to the ‘INSTALL’ file that is part of the distribution archive. Typically you invoke ./configure and then make check install. There are a number of compile-time parameters, as discussed below.

The compression library, libz, as well as p11-kit are a optional dependencies. You can get libz from http://www.zlib.net/ and p11-kit from http://p11-glue.freedesktop.org/.

The X.509 part of GnuTLS needs ASN.1 functionality, from a library called libtasn1. A copy of libtasn1 is included in GnuTLS. If you want to install it separately (e.g., to make it possibly to use libtasn1 in other programs), you can get it from http://www.gnu.org/software/gnutls/download.html.

A few configure options may be relevant, summarized below. They disable or enable particular features, to create a smaller library with only the required features.

--disable-srp-authentication
--disable-psk-authentication
--disable-anon-authentication
--disable-extra-pki
--disable-openpgp-authentication
--disable-openssl-compatibility
--without-p11-kit

For the complete list, refer to the output from configure --help.

This document was generated on January 4, 2012 using texi2html 5.0.