CentOSBuild

Building CDE on CentOS 7

CentOS 7 builds the current CDE without major problems. The guide given here assumes that you start out with the minimal installation (Core, without X11). If you use a desktop ISO to install, you'll probably have most of the dependencies installed already. In that case yum will just moan about already installed packages, but with no bad consequences:

Dependencies

Install Xorg and the required packages by issuing the following commands as root or a sudo-authorized user (sudo bash --login):

yum -y groupinstall "X window system"

for fnt in $(yum list | grep dpi | grep -v '^fcitx' | awk '{print $1}'); do
    export FONTPKGS="${FONTPKGS} ${fnt}"
done

yum -y install $FONTPKGS git ksh  motif-devel bdftopcf \
rpcbind ncompress bison ksh93 libXinerama-devel libXdmcp-devel \
libXScrnSaver-devel libXmu-devel libXaw-devel libXft-devel \
libtirpc-devel libjpeg-devel tcl-devel openssl-devel gcc gcc-c++

unset FONTPKGS

cat > /usr/bin/yacc << EOF
#!/bin/sh
exec /bin/bison -y "$@"
EOF
chmod a+rx /usr/bin/yacc

If you haven't started from the minimum installation and already are running in Xorg, you can skip the next part, which enables X11 at startup.

ln -svf /lib/systemd/system/graphical.target /etc/systemd/system/default.target

Getting the sources

Clone the sources to a directory of your choice. for instance /usr/local :

cd /usr/local/src && git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/cdesktopenv/code cdesktopenv-code

Compiling CDE

As of February 22nd 2019, CDE compiles without any need to interfere. Use the following sequence to create a log file of the build, just in case something goes wrong in future versions. That makes it easier for the developers to hunt down any bugs.

cd cdesktopenv-code/cde 
make World 2>&1 | tee centos-$(uname -r)-build.log

Installing

Issue the following commands:

    admin/IntegTools/dbTools/installCDE -s /usr/local/src/cdesktopenv-code/cde/

    mkdir -p /var/spool/calendar

be sure to adjust the source path behind the -s parameter if you didn't clone into the /usr/local/src directory.

Enabling dtlogin

If you want to run dtlogin as your display manager be sure to disable your current one, which with CentOS is usually lightdm:

systemctl disable lightdm 

systemctl stop lightdm

This will get you out of your X11 session and you can test dtlogin:

/usr/dt/bin/dtlogin -nodaemon

If you have it confirmed to be working, you can log into CDE, open a terminal and fire off the following sequence to make it your new display manager:

cat > /lib/systemd/system/dtlogin.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=Common Desktop Environment Login Manager
Documentation=man:dtlogin(1)
Conflicts=getty@tty1.service
After=getty@tty1.service systemd-user-sessions.service plymouth-quit.service acpid.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/dt/bin/dtlogin -daemon
Restart=always
IgnoreSIGPIPE=no
BusName=org.freedesktop.DisplayManager

[Install]
Alias=display-manager.service
EOF

Now that you have the service unit, you can enable it:

systemctl enable dtlogin

reboot, and welcome to the good old days.