OpenCDE Documentation

Compiling OpenCDE

Before you can compile OpenCDE, the only dependency that it relies upon (Motif) needs to be compiled/installed prior to OpenCDE.

The below instructions work fine on FreeBSD so most unix-like operating systems should use a similar procedure. Many Linux distributions package up the development libraries seperately e.g. Debian requires the x11proto-print, libxp-dev and xorg-dev packages to be installed in order to compile OpenMotif.

OpenMotif

OpenMotif has been chosen as the provider of the Motif widget library rather than LessTif primarily since although it is encumbered with licensing restrictions, it is the more common distribution of Motif on many unix-based operating systems and so is less likely to break compatibility with other software.

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
$ LANG=C gmake
# gmake install

Motifmm

This is an object orientated GUI library which wraps the motif toolkit allowing for techniques such as RAII etc... It is provided with OpenCDE and is automatically compiled as part of the build process. Operating system packagers may want to break it up into an individual package for convenience.

OpenCDE

Now we can compile OpenCDE. The first step is to edit config.Mk and set the PLATFORM variable to your given operating system. Above the variable there is a line of example platforms. If you are not running any of these, you can perhaps attempt to specify PLATFORM=OTHER

From here you should now be able to build OpenCDE by issuing the following commands.

$ cd src
$ gmake

Using OpenCDE

Since OpenCDE uses no hard coded path variables, it can be copied to any location and run with the following commands (assuming that PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH have been updated to reflect the location of OpenCDE).

$ dtsession

If you would like the OpenCDE login manager dtlogin to start automatically when you boot your computer, the following can be added to /etc/rc.conf.

dtlogin

This can also be run by root to start up X11 and the login manager (make sure X11 or another login manager is not already running).

Currently the only tested operating systems are FreeBSD and RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.

If the user has a ~/.xsession file the login manager will use that instead of running the typical OpenCDE session. Make sure that this file is set as executable otherwise the user will be immediately returned to the login screen