CDE on Slackware 14.2
 

Brief introduction: I'm a hobbyist, not a pro. I like retrocomputing partly because I dislike waste (my Thinkpad T42p and 2009 MacBook pro are chugging along just fine, TYVM) and partly because really old machines hold the nostalgia of never-was. While I was slugging away at my VIC-20 and my best friend's 286, my uncle was working for the DMA and spoke strange and mysterious words like "UNIX" and "firewall." Now that I'm much older and have some resources, those formerly unattainably potent old systems are still the ones that hold some allure for me. I like reading vintage UNIX books.

This thread is old, but useful. I'd like to report that today I successfully complied CDE on Slackware 14.2. I used the default "motif" package, and installed xlt from Slackbuilds. I'm running a 32 bit generic kernel on a Thinkpad T42p.I did not have to do any special locale configuring, but I did have to enable rpc, as per that old thread.

I am feeling pretty happy right now; this old rig has been running ubuntu for the last few years, but ubuntu is getting so resource-heavy that scroling through a web-page in firefox is untenably slow. Seamonkey is working just fine here in CDE on Slackware 14.2.


-N

That's nice but could you use multiple monitors, or the scroll wheel on the mouse? Does it have a system tray with audio mixer, clipboard, clock, maybe even weather forecast, and able to minimize programs to an icon? I know it's like Windows 3 but can you add a Windows 95-style menu? I want to try CDE again but the main problem last time was no mouse wheel scrolling, and maybe not much of a system tray.

I have followed that thread, and I am legit interested in CDE because it just looks so delightfully retro, and if I am not mistaken the latest release no longer requires CDE to run in an insecure mode? If thats the case I would love to at least see a slackbuilds available on slackbuilds.org. I tried to build on my 64-bit 14.2 install just for the hell of it, but it wouldn't work.

i would like to see a SlackBuild for Slackware64-Current

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

That's cool. Well done!

this works fine on current (and should work also on 14.2)

http://ponce.cc/slackware/testing/CDE/

I haven't checked what doesn't work in that case, but reports are welcome.

i tried to build CDE from Ponce's SlackBuild and got this error


then went back to ponce's website to look for a CDE.sh file i missed and there isn't one

http://ponce.cc/slackware/testing/CDE/files/CDE.sh :scratch:

to get all the necessary build files, just

Hi dchmelik:

Two-finger scrolling worked out-of-the-box on my touchpad. I had to add a couple of xinput lines to my .dtprofile to get middle-button scrolling going. I'm on a thinkpad, and this stuff is pretty well documented at thinkwiki. For a mouse with an actual wheel I expect the procedure is not too different.

CDE doesn't have a notifications area, but the main panel does have some system-tray type functionality. There's a clock, calendar, and trash by default. Windows minimize into individual icons on the desktop, rather than into any particular container (there's no "taskbar" equivalent or "iconification area"). I'm just starting to learn how it all works, but it seems pretty customizable. There's a whole .dt directory with configuration stuff that mostly seem to be plain text files. Since the clock and calendar behave like applets and not launchers, I suspect it would be no problem for someone who knows the motif API to create the functionality you're looking for (e.g., volume control applet).

Jeebiz:

I believe that's correct. The slackware documentation on the sourceforge CDE wiki has a section about "enabling insecure mode," but all it said was something like "this just turns on RPC. CDE doesn't need insecure mode."

Well I don't know what I did differently this time, and I didn't even bother to worry about nawk, or make any symlinks, and again this is a normal 64-bit install of Slackware, I went into the cde directory and ran a compile just to see what happens, and well...it compiled successfully:

Again, thats me ignoring making the language symlinks, disregarding (or forgetting that slackware doesn't have nawk, etc) So.........yea...The dry-run compile worked.

Well I think I can say that compiling cde on 14.2 64-bit outright is not an issue as I tested it again:

However I do not plan to install it (make install), as this is a production machine. Maybe when I have more time I might play with cde in a VM or something - but again no nawk on slackware (so I expected the build to fail, (I did not make a symlink awk to nawk in the cde source code, I outright downloaded the tarball, extracted it and compiled it *as is* and it didn't fail) and I haven't made any language symlinks, I think thats if you just want to actually run cde , but again since this is 2.3.0 , is the rpcbind thing still an issue? As per documentation it appears not to be? I don't know.

ah ha, i see what i did wrong, but now this sounds messy

(from the README.Slackware)

VARIOUS IMPORTANT NOTES - *MUST* READ

- The build process will install stuff into your /usr, /etc/ and /var,
spamming everywhere, so if you have already installed CDE, you
should remove its stuff prior to building this: this is because CDE
devs have hardcoded building/installing thingies and we can't do
anything about it.

not sure i want to go there...

No , not on a production machine, but I say play with it in a VM as I am planning to do.

Its wrong. Such kind of site applications should always go under /usr/local. I have Haskell but of course it is under /usr/local. I can't imagine to mess with default directories where all Slackware packages (eventually SBo builds) go. Well some SBo scripts are very poor. So not every application I need, which has actually SBo script, can be build and installed this way. Other example is TexLive. Full version is about 4 GB. It is senseless to try to repackage it into Slackware package. So I removed default TexLive Slackware package and installed TexLive under /usr/local. On shared machine it would be even better to put it under $HOME. Just to avoid other users accidentally run this. Essentially $HOME is user directory where user should put its own binaries and all staff needed to run them - except system shared libraries.

sorry igadoter, maybe you didn't read that README.Slackware file, but it's about a different thing than the one you are talking about: I'll paste again the interested bit fully
it's about install paths hardcoded in the sources (there's no choice whatsoever to install things anywhere else): mainly everything goes in /usr/dt in the filesystem with "make install" so, to package the results, you have to "make install" in clean system (or delete the destination paths interested before issuing the command).
I wrote CDE devs were to blame for this but most probably it's something inherited from the past...