LilyPond Contributor's Guide: 2. Quick start

# 2. Quick start

Want to submit a patch for LilyPond? Great! This chapter is designed to let you do this as quickly and easily as possible.

It is not possible to compile LilyPond on Windows, and extremely difficulty to compile it on MacOS X. We have therefore made a ‘remix’ of Ubuntu which includes all necessary dependencies to compile both LilyPond and the documentation. This can be run inside a virtual machine without disturbing your main operating system. The full name is “Ubuntu LilyPond Developer Remix”, but we refer to it as “lilydev” for short.

Advanced note: experienced developers may prefer to use their own development environment. It may be instructive to skim over these instructions, but be aware that this chapter is intended for helpful users who may have never created a patch before.

#### LilyPond — Contributor’s Guide