Wednesday, July 22, 2009

XFCE on Solaris 10

I'm getting somewhat unsatisfied with the various desktop environments available. The desktop is currently in the doldrums, presenting a dull and dreary landscape.

So, I thought I would give XFCE another look. OK, so it turns out that it is a little bit of work to get it running on Solaris 10. There's a bunch of prerequisites that you need to build first, and a couple of tweaks. So it was a bit tedious, but I got it to work fairly easily. My install notes are available to help others down the same path.

What I've got is essentially functional. I've not worked out why some of the menu and application icons don't appear, and a few of the window manager themes don't quite work (you get strange visual artifacts) but it's functional, meets my requirements (which may be different from other people) of being easy to use, has a reasonable choice of themes, isn't quite as heavyweight as some of the other desktops, and shows promise for the future.

3 comments:

James O'Gorman said...

Hi Peter,

Regarding the dependency building, I've started a project on Project Kenai called SolPorts (http://kenai.com/projects/solports/) - it's aimed at making software building easy! It's based on Free/OpenBSD ports. A few people are interested so far...

As far as XFCE goes, it's a great little desktop.

James

guisoft said...

Hi Peter,

Why don't you just use blastwave packages?

-Yuri

Peter Tribble said...

SolPorts could be interesting - is there more information out there?

As for blastwave, the latest version they have was pretty antique when I checked. It also doesn't allow me a customized build.