Getting the Marble Source Code

The Marble source code is available in a Git repository. Make sure git is installed on your system and clone the Marble repository. You can choose between
access and choose the initial branch to be
. 
git clone -b Applications/17.04 git://invent.kde.org/education/marble ~/marble/sources

You can clone the sources to any directory on your system. If you have no preferences, choose ~/marble/sources as that is the directory we will use below.

A note on branches...

Development happens directly in the master branch. If you want to use the latest features or want to contribute to Marble, choose the master branch. The code however is not as stable as the one in the release branches.

If stability is your main concern, choose the latest stable release branch, which can easily be recognized by the Applications/ prefix followed by a release date in year/month format, e.g. Applications/16.08 for the release in August 2016.

Here is a list of commonly used branch names:

master
Latest development
Applications/yy.mm
Stable release branches
KDE/4.x
Outdated stable release branches

Marble follows the common KDE release schedule. New features are developed in and merged to the master branch until the soft (hard) feature freeze. Afterwards a stabilizing period in master follows during which no new features and similar changes are committed to master. At the time of the first release candidate RC1 a new Applications/year.month branch is created from the current master branch. Afterwards the master branch is open for development again. The Applications/year.month are stable branches that never receive new features.

Don't worry too much about branches though! Thanks to git switching between branches is as easy as running e.g. git checkout -b Applications/17.04 origin/Applications/17.04 and requires no Internet connection. No need to clone the repository again if you got the inital branch wrong above, just switch to it later.

Compiling the Sources

Let's assume you cloned the Marble repository like shown above to the directory ~/marble/sources. You have cmake and a working compiler toolchain (e.g. GCC and related tools) available and the Qt development packages are installed as well. You choose the build type to be
and install the
version of Marble to
using the following commands: 
mkdir -p ~/marble/build
cd ~/marble/build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DWITH_KF5=TRUE -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local ~/marble/sources
make
sudo make install

Running Marble

When the compilation and installation finished successfully, you can execute 
/usr/local/bin/marble