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The os-cillation team maintains unofficial, always up to date Debian
packages for the Xfce Desktop Environment, which are used in creation of
the Xfld Live-Linux Distribution.
We provide binary packages for i386, which we've built on a Debian
testing (sarge) machine, so you need atleast Debian testing to install them.
We don't test these packages on Debian unstable (sid), but it is likely that
they work with unstable as well (users have reported that they are using
the packages on Debian unstable without problems); afterall, we don't
provide support for installing our packages on a Debian unstable system.
To start the installation of the Debian packages, add the following
two lines to the file /etc/apt/sources.list on your system:
deb http://www.os-works.com/debian testing main
deb-src http://www.os-works.com/debian testing main
You'll have to update your package cache afterwards, using the
command (as user root):
apt-get update
This may take some time dependeing on your bandwidth.
Now, if you want to install the whole Xfld desktop - including the Terminal emulator, the ROX file manager, the Xfmedia media
player and several additional panel plugins - you should run the command
apt-get install -t testing xfld-desktop
as user root. This will download all required packages and
install them on your computer. The parameter -t testing should
not be needed in most cases, but it doesn't hurt either. It tells
apt-get to use packages from the testing release
- which is the release name we use for our repository - even if your
system defaults to another release (e.g. unstable). See this
introduction
to APT Pinning for further details on how to manage multiple APT
sources. For example, if you are using Debian unstable (aka sid), you
may need to add the following lines to the file
/etc/apt/preferences/ (create the file if its not already
present on your system) to ensure that you will actually install
Xfce 4.2 and not Xfce 4.0 from Debian unstable:
Package: *
Pin: origin www.os-works.com
Pin-Priority: 999
These three lines will make sure that APT assigns a higher priority to
the Xfce 4.2, when installing or upgrading software on your system. Once
you have added these lines, you don't need to use the -t testing
option to apt-get any longer.
In case you want to use only the core components of the Xfce 4.2
Desktop Environment, the command
apt-get install -t testing xfce4
will install the window manager, session manager, panel, file manager
and the various utilities that ship with Xfce, but not the additional
software that completes the Xfld Desktop.
If you have Xfce 4.0.x currently installed on your system, you can
try to upgrade to the Xfce 4.2 packages using the command
apt-get dist-upgrade
If you have trouble upgrading from the Xfce packages in the official
Debian repository, you could try to uninstall the official packages
first:
apt-get remove libxfce4util-1
will remove all Xfce packages from your system. Afterwards, you should
retry with the installation as described above.
In addition to the i386 binary packages, we provide the Debian
sources, so you can use our packages
on non-i386 machines as well. Read the section Installation
above for information how to add our repository as additional source to
APT. Once you've setup APT, you can build packages using the Debian
tools. For example, to create a binary package of libxfce4util for
your machine, use the commands:
apt-get build-dep libxfce4util
apt-get -b source libxfce4util
Read the section Working with source packages in the APT HOWTO for further
details.
Andreas Weber provides
ready-to-install Debian/amd64 versions of our Debian packages. Just
add the lines
deb-src http://www.os-works.com/debian testing main
deb http://www.kanotix.lxserv.de/debian ./
to your /etc/apt/sources.list. Note, that os-cillation doesn't
officially support these packages. Please contact Andreas Weber if you
experience problems with those packages.
Rob Thijssen provides ready-to-install
Debian/alpha versions of our Debian packages. Just add the lines
deb-src http://www.os-works.com/debian testing main
eb http://thini.net/debian testing main
to your /etc/apt/sources.list. Visit his website for
more information.
Nacho Barrientos provides
pre-built Debian/ppc versions of our Debian packages. Just add
the lines
deb-src http://www.os-works.com/debian testing main
deb http://amok.criptonita.com/~nacho/xfce unstable main
to your /etc/apt/sources.list. Visit his website for
more information.
Once you have installed the packages, you can start using Xfce now. If
you are using a display manager like GDM or KDM to log in to your system,
Xfce will automagically appear in the session chooser menu, and you can
start it. Else, if you are using a simple display manager like XDM, you
will have to create a file .xsession in your home directory with
the following content
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/startxfce4
and mark the file as executable (chmod +x ~/.xsession). Otherwise,
if you use startx to log in to your X desktop session, create a
file called .xinitrc in your home directory which contains
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/startxfce4
and mark it executable (chmod +x ~/.xinitrc).
If you want to use our Debian packages on multiple systems in a networked
environment, it might be a good idea to establish a local mirror of our
Debian repository, so you don't need to fetch the packages from the
internet for every system. You can use the utility debmirror
to create a mirror of the packages and keep it up to date.
For example, to mirror the i386 binary packages into the directory
/ftp/mirror/debian, use the command:
debmirror -a i386 -s main -h www.os-works.com \
-d testing -r /debian --progress \
-e http --ignore-release-gpg \
/ftp/mirror/debian
Say, for example, the directory /ftp/mirror/debian is accessible
via ftp as ftp://mymirror/debian/, then you'd put the line
deb ftp://mymirror/debian/ testing main
in the /etc/apt/sources.list file on every system in your network.
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