How to compile a basic D-Bus/glib example?

Note that libdbus-glib is deprecated, unmaintained and should not be used for accessing D-Bus from C: use GDBus instead. libdbus-1 is not recommended either: it is maintained, but is a much lower-level API for using D-Bus, and does not have all the convenience features of GDBus.

As enthusiasticgeek says, there’s good GDBus documentation available.

(libdbus-glib and libdbus-1 deliberately not linked to avoid giving them google juice.)

Tutorials like this one generally assume that you have some knowledge of the language it is written for, in this case C, as well as the operating system you will run it on.

Looking at the tutorial, I see that it only contains a main function. As such, you will need to add the proper #include directives in order for this to work:

#include <stdlib.h>          // for exit()   
#include <dbus/dbus.h>       // for dbus_*   
#include <dbus/dbus-glib.h>  // for dbus_g_*

Also, you will need to compile the libraries (in this case dbus and dbus-glib), or use the pre-compiled ones from your operating system, in order to link them to the executable.

You will also need the header files provided with the source, or the "development" packages from your operating system.

Per example, on my Ubuntu workstation, I can install both the source and the header files like so:

sudo apt-get -y install dbus libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-2 libdbus-glib-1-dev

Once they are compiled (or properly installed), you proceed to compile the program. You will need to specify the proper include paths and libraries to link to the compiler/linker. Per example, with GCC and my current setup it would be:

gcc test.c -I/usr/include/dbus-1.0 \
           -I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dbus-1.0/include \
           -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 \
           -I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/include/ \
           -ldbus-1 \
           -ldbus-glib-1 \
           -Wall -Wextra

This should create an executable a.out in the current directory.

Granted, I have a few years of experience with C and Linux so I get figure out all that stuff easily. If you're looking to start with C, you probably should start with something easier though.