CDE - Common Desktop Environment

LinuxBuild

Authors:

CDE for Linux is currently Alpha Quality

We are currently requesting that all contributions to the project are licenced under the MIT licence. Find out why?

WARNING: THIS GUIDE IS FOR ADVANCED USERS FOR USE IN BUILDING AND PORTING.

Before you compile, please check the status of your distribution/platform. It will save you a lot of hassle.

CDE on Linux is not yet to the point of being simple to package for distribution or a relatively simple to compile from the source archive.

1) Build Prerequisites

1.1) Supported Platforms

The initial Linux port is intended to be a minimal impact port, changing just what is required to make it build and run, so no warning fixes, refactoring, changing the build system or other niceties have been implemented as yet.

Check the supported platforms page for a complete list.

1.2) Parts of CDE that are not building yet

dtinfo - A program for displaying the guide series of books.
dtksh - A version of the ksh shell with additions for creating GUI applications.
documentation - Pages required for dtinfo.

1.3) Known Issues with built components

dtcreate - Used for creating new action icons for menus etc, fails to startup with Tooltalk error - tt_ptype_declare (TT_ERR_PTYPE) (now working on git master)
dtmail - "Mailer has not been properly installed, and cannot run because the execution group is incorrectly set." (now working on git master)
dtcm/rpc.cmsd - calendar manager. There are a variety of problems with this.

1.4) Install Dependencies

Compile-time and run-time requirements

On debian-like systems (including Ubuntu) install the following packages;

git (for downloading from source repository)
build-essentials or build-essential
libxp-dev
libxt-dev
libxmu-dev
libxft-dev
libmotif or libmotif3 or libmotif4 (Openmotif, in non-free or restricted)
libmotif-dev (Openmotif, in non-free or restricted)
libxaw7-dev (used by dtinfo)
libx11-dev
x11-xserver-utils (for xset)
libjpeg-dev or libjpeg62-dev
libfreetype6-dev
tcl-dev
ksh (required for database to any script, and probably dtksh building)
m4 (required for nsgmls building)
ncompress (old style unix 'compress' needed when building help files)
xfonts-100dpi (for nicer looking fonts)
xfonts-100dpi-transcode or xfonts-100dpi-transcoded
rpcbind (or portmap) requires running in insecure mode (-i) see section 1.6 below
bison
xbitmaps

On Red Hat and Fedora 17 see this page.

Archlinux

See this page for additional notes.

Slackware 32/64 bit

See this page for additional notes

Do not install the following items

Lesstif
imake

1.5) Generate additional locale support

Generate system support for German, Spanish, French, and Italian locales:

On Ubuntu

sudo locale-gen de_DE
sudo locale-gen es_ES
sudo locale-gen fr_FR
sudo locale-gen it_IT

On Debian

Run dpkg-reconfigure locales and select the following off the list

de_DE ISO-8859-1
es_ES ISO-8859-1
fr_FR ISO-8859-1
it_IT ISO-8859-1

For generic Linux

Edit locale.gen, usually found in /etc and uncomment (remove the # space from the start of the line) the following lines;

de_DE.ISO-8859-1
es_ES.ISO-8859-1
fr_FR.ISO-8859-1
it_IT.ISO-8859-1

Then run the locale-gen to generate them

locale-gen

1.6) Modify rpcbind to run in insecure mode

Modify rpcbind to run in insecure mode (-i)

On Ubuntu
Edit /etc/init/portmap.conf
On Debian
Edit /etc/init.d/rpcbind
Find the line "OPTIONS="-w" and replace with "OPTIONS="-w -i"
Note: On Debian Squeeze this might be /etc/init.d/portmap

Restart the service or reboot the machine

2) Compiling

2.1) Get a copy of the repository

Use the git clone command here
https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/code/

Or get a copy of the source from a the Download Page. Extract the archive into a directory called 'cdesktopenv-code' (this isn't a strict requirement, but will make the rest of the instructions easier to follow)

Note: The source archive can become out of date rapidly. When in doubt, use the git repository

2.2) Link in X11 headers

The X11 library headers need to be symlinked into the build tree. Be careful of capitalisation of 'x' and 'X' here.

cd cdesktopenv-code/cde
mkdir -p imports/x11/include
cd imports/x11/include
ln -s /usr/include/X11 .

2.3) Attempt to build

cd cdesktopenv-code/cde
make World

The build will terminate with a successfully built message.

After you've built World, it should have compiled up the libraries and quite a few of the apps.

To check look in cdesktopenv-code/cde/exports/lib there should be 10 different CDE libraries.

2.4) Test running some applications

(Replace /path/to/ with the path to the location of your source tree.)

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/cdesktopenv/cde/exports/lib 
cd cdesktopenv-code/cde/programs/dtcalc
./dtcalc

3) Installing

The install actions should only need to be done once on install, or on reinstall of later versions.

(Replace /path/to/ with the path to the location of your source tree.)

# Install CDE
cd cdesktopenv-code/cde/admin/IntegTools/dbTools
sudo ./installCDE -s /path/to/cdesktopenv-code/cde/

# Run the linux post install script (this does have a couple of errors reported)
cd cdesktopenv-code/cde/admin/IntegTools/post_install/linux
sudo ./configRun -e

Note: This may terminate with inetd errors. These are harmless and can be ignored.

# It seems this dir needs to be writable by every user of CDE
sudo chmod -R a+rwx /var/dt

# Directory required for calendar service
sudo mkdir -p /usr/spool/calendar

4) Running

4.1) Running (Single User)

Switch to virtual terminal and log in as root

# kill off xserver.  For example, if you are running lightdm:
service lightdm stop

# note, you do not need to run rpc.ttdbserver.  If you *really* want to, 
# then start it with /usr/dt/bin/rpc.ttdbserver and confirm its running
# rpcinfo -p

You can log off root and into your regular user here

# add /usr/dt/bin to your PATH
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/dt/bin
export LANG=C
# Start CDE
startx /usr/dt/bin/Xsession

This should boot into the CDE desktop

(You can change the export LANG=C to LANG="fr_FR.ISO8859-1", LANG="de_DE.ISO8859-1", LANG="es_ES.ISO8859-1" or LANG="it_IT.ISO8859-1", for non English languages.)

Switch to virtual terminal and log in as root

# kill off xserver.  For example, if you are running lightdm:
service lightdm stop

# note, you do not need to run rpc.ttdbserver.  If you *really* want to, 
# then start it with /usr/dt/bin/rpc.ttdbserver and confirm its running
# rpcinfo -p

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/dt/bin
export LANG=C
cd /usr/dt/bin
./dtlogin

This should start the login screen.

(You can change the export LANG=C to LANG="fr_FR.ISO8859-1", LANG="de_DE.ISO8859-1", LANG="es_ES.ISO8859-1" or LANG="it_IT.ISO8859-1", for non English languages. Or choose a language from the dtlogin UI.)

Follow the instructions on this sub page to create a xsession file to allow a CDE session to be chosen from lightdm/gdm/kdm list of login sessions.