Compilation from source

File:Placeholder

Here the basic installation of Sawfish 1.8.1 under Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.1a (Squeeze) is described, but it's almost the same for practically every GNU/Linux. *BSD, Solaris or other Unixoids might require additional steps.

Caution: This is a raw installation into /usr/local without package manager, and it is not recommended, if your distribution provides reasonably up-do-date packages or if you're inexperienced. If you proceed, first uninstall the packages coming from your distribution, if you don't do so, you'll very likely run into trouble.

Installation

Open a terminal-emulator and create a directory for the Sawfish source files:

:~$ cd $HOME
:~$ mkdir build

Go into the build directory and Download the source files for the build:

:~$ cd build
:~/build$ wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/librep/librep-0.92.0.tar.bz2
:~/build$ wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/librep/rep-gtk/rep-gtk-0.90.6.tar.bz2
:~/build$ wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/sawfish/sawfish-1.8.1.tar.bz2
:~/build$ wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/sawfishpager/sawfish-pager-0.90.2.tar.bz2

Extract the code from the .tar.bz2 (alternatively you can grab .tar.xz files) files.

:~/build$ tar -xvjf librep-0.92.0.tar.bz2
:~/build$ tar -xvjf rep-gtk-0.90.6.tar.bz2
:~/build$ tar -xvjf sawfish-1.8.1.tar.bz2
:~/build$ tar -xvjf sawfish-pager-0.90.2.tar.bz2

For GNU/Tar atleast `tar xf file.tar.bz2' is enough.

There are dependencies for Sawfish 1.8.1 that must be installed prior to building the Sawfish window manager.

• gtk+ >= 2.12
• pango (optional, but recommended for UTF-8 support)
• gdk-pixbuf-xlib OR imlib1 (imlib2 is currently not supported)
• GNU autotools to compile.

First become root (the system administrator, also: super user). (From now on, distinguish by the prompt-sign if it's necessary to be root). Depending on your setup, you might want to use `sudo' instead of `su'.

~/build$ su
root@build# aptitude install gettext autoconf libltdl-dev automake \
  libtool autotools-dev gcc libreadline-dev readline-common libffi-dev \
  libgdbm-dev libgmp3-dev libgmp3-doc libgtk2.0-doc libgtk2.0-dev \
  libpango1.0-dev libpango1.0-doc lsb-build-desktop3

On Linux-Mint 12 (and probably Ubuntu 11.10) the following packages were also required:

root@build# aptitude install libgdbm-dev texinfo libxtst-dev

Become an ordinary user again, by using `exit':

root@build# exit

On other GNU/Linux' you'll use the package manager provided (eg: yum for Fedora, zypper for SuSE).

Now we're ready to start building Sawfish. Go into the librep directory, configure, and make:

:~/build cd librep-0.92.0
:~/build/librep-0.92.0$ ./configure
:~/build/librep-0.92.0$ make

If it now fails with an error-message coming from libtool, it's not a bug within Sawfish. Specific versions of libtool 2.6 are known to fail, if that's the case issue autogen instead of configure and proceed with make. If then the issue still appears, you need to check your distributors repo for a different version of libtool 2.6 (older or newer) and start again:

:~/build$ ./autogen.sh
:~/build$ make

Install as root:

:~/build$ su
root@build/librep-0.92.0# make install
root@build/librep-0.92.0# exit

Since this will put your installation into /usr/local/ you might have to put it into your path.

:~/build$ echo $PATH

if the list provided does not contain /usr/local/bin/ add it using the following command:

:~/build$ export PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/bin"

additionally add this line at the end of your shell's configuration file, for GNU Bash it would be $HOME/.bashrc

Go back to top-level build directory:

:~/build/librep-0.92.0$ cd ../

The rest of the installation is very similar to the above, thus only commands are listed from this point onward.

Remember: if you had a buggy libtool version, use ./autogen.sh instead of configure.in

:~/build$ cd rep-gtk-0.90.6
:~/build/rep-gtk-0.90.6$ ./configure

What to do if librep can't be found? Some distributions don't have the installation directory in the PKG_CONFIG_PATH, therefore librep can't be found. Normally installations in /usr and /usr/local are fine. If you happen to install somewhere else (say: /opt/), you'll need to do this:

:~/build/rep-gtk-0.90.6$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$PGK_CONFIG_PATH:/opt/lib/pkgconfig/"

Now continue the build.

:~/sawfish/rep-gtk-0.90.6$ make

If make fails, giving an error about missing librep library, then that's because your distributor hasn't setup your installation directory properly for building software, fix this by doing:

root@build/rep-gtk-0.90.6# libtool --finish /usr/local/lib/rep
root@build/rep-gtk-0.90.6# ldconfig

as root and start make again. Sometimes it might be sufficient to simply update the shared library ld cache using the "ldconfig" command.

;~/build/rep-gtk-0.90.6$ make
root@build/rep-gtk-0.90.6# make install

If you needed to run libtool for librep, then repeat that step for rep-gtk.

:~/build/rep-gtk-0.90.6$ cd ../

:~/build$ cd sawfish-1.8.1
:~/build/sawfish-1.8.1$ ./configure
:~/build/sawfish-1.8.1$ make
root@build/sawfish-1.8.1# make install
:~/build/sawfish-1.8.1$ cd ../

:~/build$ cd sawfish-pager-0.90.2
:~/build/sawfish-pager-0.90.2$ ./configure
:~/build/sawfish-pager-0.90.2$ make
root@build/sawfish-pager-0.90.2# make install
:~/build/sawfish-pager-0.90.2$ cd $HOME

Now explore the Wiki and adjust your newly build Sawfish window manager the way you would like it to be!