Lilypond

Lilypond is a piece of free software for typesetting music.

Getting Started

Installation

Open up the Terminal activity and type these commands.

wget http://download.linuxaudio.org/lilypond/binaries/linux-x86/lilypond-2.11.39-1.linux-x86.sh
sh lilypond-2.11.39-1.linux-x86.sh

This will download the development version of lilypond and install it to your home directory. You may want to add ~/bin to your PATH to avoid having to type ~/bin/lilypond every time. Add this to the end of your ~/.bashrc:

PATH=$PATH:~/bin

Create a Lilypond file

This is a vast subject. See the lilypond documentation for more information. For now just create a simple file test.ly:

\version "2.11.39"
{c' d' e' f'}

Running

lilypond test.ly

The current directory should now contain test.pdf and test.ps.

If you see memory errors try entering the following into the terminal before running:

export LILYPOND_GC_YIELD=50

The default is 70. Generally lower numbers mean use more CPU and less memory. Higher numbers mean use more memory and less CPU. 50 seemed to work, but I didn't do extensive testing.

Opening the PDF

Open up the Browse activity and navigate to file:///home/olpc/. Go to the directory where you ran lilypond and click on test.pdf.

Using Lilypond on the OLPC

Right now it is rather clunky to use Lilypond with the terminal, browser, and reader. An activity which would combine an editor with a pdf viewer would be ideal. (Examples: http://lilypondtool.organum.hu/, http://lilykde.googlecode.com/)