Fighting with xfce 4.6 installation on debian
I was kinda disappointed i can't properly install xfce 4.6 on debian lenny with aptitude. Also tried backports with issues like here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ys-4.4-775588/
I decided to go the proven (cloacms++) way of building from sources.
So, i fetched all(almost) files from http://mocha.xfce.org/archive/xfce-4.6.1/src/
and started building. I removed my xfce 4.4 installation and built libraries first.
I now don't exactly remember the order, but it's understandable: when you "configuring" it, it will track all dependencies, so you just build what is required by current package. Everything you need can be found on that URL.
For first time i had error when building xfdesktop: http://codepad.org/lINEEs2O (or http://phps.web31337.org/e3c7663dd36d.php if not found). It was because my exo-0.3 library includes weren't placed in /usr/include/exo-0.3/, they were in /usr/local/include/exo-0.3/. i rebuilt it today when moved it to /usr/include as it should be, replacing old version was in there from debian(yes, it was because i forgot to remove it and then stuck with dependencies so i couldn't aptitude remove it without harming the system). Actually, it won't fail if you configure it without exo, but that's not really what i want: a desktop without icons support(as shown in results of configure when configuring with "--disable-exo").
Next problem i experienced, is when i logged in it said $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is not set or not properly set. I then googled for this variable name and found a solution in editing one of my files in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/ to add something like
And then i finally successfully launched 4.6 and saw my previous desktop i had(configs were saved in ~/.config/xfce4* dirs).
After that i built two plugins i needed: it's netload and cpugraph plugins, you can get em here: http://goodies.xfce.org/releases/ , also installed thunar-volman from there.
I can say i restored my entire previous desktop settings and what's most great is at last i can move window buttons in tray(was really surprised not seeing this in 4.4.2 from debian lenny 0_o). Some other good configurations were also added in 4.6, i can say it's rather tiny and good desktop manager at this point.
But, what is more important, it looks like the bug with memory leak isn't really related to xfce itself. It lies deeper, probably in glib from debian lenny. Yet i still leave this untouched, maybe i will move to gentoo after New Year or to Debian sid or maybe i will choose to rebuild system libraries at last as i meant to do long time ago when fixes came out.
P.S. Building from sources FTW! I always said that.
P.S.2. Screenshot as i write this. Not too different from 4.4 anyways, i set it all to same old, quite minimal style.
I decided to go the proven (cloacms++) way of building from sources.
So, i fetched all(almost) files from http://mocha.xfce.org/archive/xfce-4.6.1/src/
and started building. I removed my xfce 4.4 installation and built libraries first.
I now don't exactly remember the order, but it's understandable: when you "configuring" it, it will track all dependencies, so you just build what is required by current package. Everything you need can be found on that URL.
For first time i had error when building xfdesktop: http://codepad.org/lINEEs2O (or http://phps.web31337.org/e3c7663dd36d.php if not found). It was because my exo-0.3 library includes weren't placed in /usr/include/exo-0.3/, they were in /usr/local/include/exo-0.3/. i rebuilt it today when moved it to /usr/include as it should be, replacing old version was in there from debian(yes, it was because i forgot to remove it and then stuck with dependencies so i couldn't aptitude remove it without harming the system). Actually, it won't fail if you configure it without exo, but that's not really what i want: a desktop without icons support(as shown in results of configure when configuring with "--disable-exo").
Next problem i experienced, is when i logged in it said $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is not set or not properly set. I then googled for this variable name and found a solution in editing one of my files in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/ to add something like
Code:
export XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=/usr/etc:/usr/etc/xdg
After that i built two plugins i needed: it's netload and cpugraph plugins, you can get em here: http://goodies.xfce.org/releases/ , also installed thunar-volman from there.
I can say i restored my entire previous desktop settings and what's most great is at last i can move window buttons in tray(was really surprised not seeing this in 4.4.2 from debian lenny 0_o). Some other good configurations were also added in 4.6, i can say it's rather tiny and good desktop manager at this point.
But, what is more important, it looks like the bug with memory leak isn't really related to xfce itself. It lies deeper, probably in glib from debian lenny. Yet i still leave this untouched, maybe i will move to gentoo after New Year or to Debian sid or maybe i will choose to rebuild system libraries at last as i meant to do long time ago when fixes came out.
P.S. Building from sources FTW! I always said that.
P.S.2. Screenshot as i write this. Not too different from 4.4 anyways, i set it all to same old, quite minimal style.
Total Comments 4
Comments
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or maybe it was fixed. anyway it needs time to understand, i can't really say by now.
i will post back here when i will finally establish that. i still hope problem was with xfce 4.4.Posted 12-18-2009 at 09:58 PM by Web31337 
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how's testing of xfce 4.6 goes up there?
Posted 12-21-2009 at 03:31 AM by cloacms
Updated 12-21-2009 at 03:33 AM by cloacms -
it seem to be fixed, cloacms!
i started xfce at 19 dec, xfdesktop memory usage changed from 66M to 72M only when i was tweaking some settings here, so actually memory usage doesn't change anymore. It's been 3 days of regular work, by now it should already have taken around 120-150M or 200M even, as you well know. So, if you won't succeed with apt as was adviced back in thread, you may wish to try building it from sources. I will post an order of building xfce 4.6 from scratch in this blog when i will do it again. =)
good luck!Posted 12-22-2009 at 01:12 AM by Web31337
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thanks for your attention, Web31337! i will try that.
Posted 12-23-2009 at 02:05 AM by cloacms
