Tips for building VWM
 

frenchn00b

In order to build VWM you will need to meet a few requirements.

1. You will need the development packages (headers) for ncurses, glib2, and optionally gpm and libgtop2. On rpm based systems (like Fedora and SUSE) these packages are typically something like ncurses-devel, gpm-devel, etc.

2. You will need to install 2 other libraries libpseudo and libviper. I am the author of these as well and you can fetch them from SourceForge or Freshmeat.

3. Make sure that your /etc/ld.so.conf includes a path for /usr/local/lib

4. Build in this order: libpseudo, libviper, vwm

**I have build VWM on Slackware 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 12.0 Fedora 8, 9, 10, 11 (i386 and x86-64)

I'm writing three SlackBuild scripts for libviper, libpseudo and vwm so that they can be put in the slackbuilds.org repository, and I've managed to get it to build and it works in xterm with a large number of rows and columns.

I just have a few questions.

Are there any command-line switches? --help, for example? Is there any documentation on how to use vwm, or is that inluded in the functionality? From what I see when I run the program, instructions are provided at the top of the screen.

I've patched the Makefiles for vwm and vwmterm2 so that installation prefix for the libraries is /usr/lib (for better compatibility with other slackware packages) and also to change the moddir variable to ${libdir}/vwm/modules and so that make install creates the relevant directories. Is this likely to break anything?

I couldn't figure out how to build the sysmon module. Does this need to be built and installed after vwm? I recall receiving errors that it couldn't find headers which appeared to be part of vwm. If that is the case, I'll separate out building the modules from the main vwm package, and have it as a separate build script.


Thanks in advance.

That's great that you are packaging it for Slackware which happens to be my favorite "flavor" of GNU/Linux for servers.

Some comments in no particular order.

- VWM will look for settings in ~/.vwm/vwmrc which are currently screen_timeout (which specifies the screen saver time in minutes) and menu_hotkey which can be used to remap the main menu to something other than "tilde".

- In the source code directory is a subdir called "keycodes" which you can build to help you figure out what code should be supplied for the menu_hotkey parameter if you want to change it to something else.

- There are currently no supported command line switches (but suggestions are welcomed).

- In order to build sysmon, you will need to have the libgtop2 headers installed (usually a package like libgtop2-devel)

- I can't remember if changing the modules directory will break anything. I will check on Tuesday when I return to the office.

- The only documentation for VWM (at this time) is the README file and the on-screen help. Any contributions would be appreciated.

Once I've written the scripts, I'll upload them to www.SlackBuilds.org and wait for one of the mods to approve (or deny) the scripts, after which building VWM for Slackware should generate packages, just like those distributed with the distro.This is handy. I've included your sample vwmrc in the package (with the docs). I don't know if this is possible, or on your list of things to do, but it might be useful to have a global config, in /etc/vwm/vwmrc which would be superseded by ~/vwm/vwmrc. Just a thought.

I've also submitted a bug report to sourceforge about how vwm_menu.h (I think) has the info on the menu shortcut hard-coded into it, so that if you change the mapping in vwmrc, it doesn't get updated in the main window. I don't know if it's possible to read the vwmrc file and then display the menu shortcut as text in the main VWM window.I've also included this in the package, so people will be able to generate their own keycodes as needed. As far as I'm aware, this shouldn't conflict with any existing binaries in /usr/bin.Now that I've mentioned it, I can't think of any besides perhaps a --help with some very basic info (author, licence, webpage) perhaps?Cool. There's a slackbuild on SlackBuilds.org for libgtop which seems to have fixed that problem. I've made a note in the README which will be distributed with the slackbuild.I've been using it this weekend with the paths changed, and everything seems to function OK, as far as I'm aware.I'll see if I can write a short intro to VWM.

Thanks.

The build scripts for libpseudo, libviper and VWM have been uploaded to the SlackBuilds.org repository. I've tested them on Slackware 12.2 and it all seems to work OK (checking -current is on my todo list).