GarXfce4 What is GarXfce4? It's a distribution/installer for Xfce 4. It's source-based, meaning it grabs source packages, compiles them, and installs the resulting binaries. It's based on the GAR ports system by Nick Moffitt: http://www.lnx-bbc.org/garchitecture.html What do I need to install GarXfce4? * A standard GNU toolchain (gcc, make, flex, bison, gettext, patch, etc). * Download and archive utilities (wget, gzip and bzip2). Xfce depends on a number of libraries. GarXfce4 assumes that a good number of them are already installed. Included (but optional) are several foundation libraries in the bootstrap/ directory, which you can use to install gtk+, libxml2, etc. if necessary. To build GarXfce4, you'll need the following software packages pre-installed in accessible locations. They are also available in the bootstrap/ subdirectory. gtk+ 2.0.6 or greater, plus all of the libraries gtk+ requires. pkgconfig (required by gtk+ at any rate) libxml2 Optionally, some Xfce 4 packages can also make use of: librsvg libstartup-notification libalsa If your OS distribution uses binary packages as its normal package management system, it is likely that you do not have the development headers installed. Often these development packages have the same name as the software package, but with "-devel" or "-dev" appended to the name. Be sure that these development packages are installed as well for the relevant libraries. How do I configure GarXfce4? The list of download mirrors is in gar.xfce4.mk in the toplevel directory. By default, the build system will try each mirror in order until it successfully downloads the file it needs. If you'd like to try one of the other mirrors, please comment out the ones above it (or move the ones above to a position below). Settings local to your machine are kept in gar.conf.mk in the toplevel directory. Most of this file need not be changed, but there are a few options you might want to play with: GARCHIVEDIR: If you've already downloaded the collection of tarballs needed to build GarXfce4, point this variable to that directory: GARCHIVEDIR = /home/brian/src/xfce4/garxfce4/tarballs main_prefix: This variable tells the build system where you want to install GarXfce4. The default is $HOME/garxfce4. If you would like to install Xfce system-wide, you'll have to change this, and compile and install the entire package as root (or via the 'sudo' command). main_sysconfdir: This variable tells the build system where to store system-wide configuration files. On most systems this is /etc. If you're installing locally (e.g., $HOME/garxfce4), leave this alone. However, if you're installing system-wide (e.g., /usr), you may want to change this to point directly to /etc (instead of e.g., /usr/etc). CC, CFLAGS: If you'd like to use a different compiler, or enable different compiler optimisations, you should customise these, e.g.: CC = gcc-3.2.3 CFLAGS = -march=athlon-tbird -ffast-math How do I use GarXfce4? Unpack the tarball (which you've most likely already done), and tweak any options in gar.conf.mk that you wish to change. Change the download mirror in gar.xfce4.mk if you'd like. Then: $ cd meta/xfce4-desktop $ make install If you need to install GarXfce4 system-wide, either first obtain a root shell, or run $ sudo make install instead. That's all there is to it. GarXfce4 will build all of Xfce 4's components and install them to the directory you specified (or $HOME/garxfce4 if you didn't specify one). As it's currently set up, GarXfce4 installs _everything_, including all the extras and goodies. If you'd like to omit certain packages, it's possible, but instructions on doing so are out of the scope of this README. How do I start Xfce 4 once it is installed? The xfce-utils package will install a script called "startxfce4". That can be used from a console to start X and Xfce 4. If you didn't install GarXfce4 system-wide, you'll need to make a script that looks something like the following: #!/bin/sh export GARXFCE4=$HOME/garxfce4 export PATH=$GARXFCE4/bin:$PATH export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$GARXFCE4/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$GARXFCE4/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH exec startxfce4 If you installed GarXfce4 to a different location, specify that path instead. It's probably easiest to put that in its own script. If you'd like to use Xfce 4 as your default desktop environment that gets run when you run 'startx' save the script as ~/.xinitrc. If you use the 'Xsession' choice in your display manager, save it as ~/.xsession. ------------ Written by Brian Tarricone , 16 Feb 2004. Last updated, 19 Mar 2004. Based on the GARNOME README by Jeff Waugh (I think).