Eck
December 28th, 2007, 05:18 PM
Now that Compiz Fusion is fully in Debian Lenny, with the exception of ccsm which I pulled from Sid, I'm concerned with finding the best way to get Emerald going in it.
Although I have mostly used the kde decorator in KDE and the gtk decorator in Gnome, I do have a collection of favorite Emerald decorations that I enjoy using as well. Seems a shame to say goodbye forever to these, but with Debian choosing not to ship Emerald as part of its supported packages this is the situation presently.
I'd like to work around that, at least until new final releases with whatever new Compiz-Fusion decorator is finalized and included in a package that Debian can feel is suitable comes down the pipe.
The official Debian packages include separate development packages for each of the Compiz and Compiz Fusion packages and I have those installed, including libdecoration0-dev. I was brainstorming that if I could go through the list of dependencies for building Compiz Fusion that is in the Compiz Fusion wiki and make sure I have all of those installed, that there shouldn't be much of a problem in building and installing emerald and emerald-themes from the 0.5.2 source tarballs.
My concern of course is whether there is something out of the ordinary I will need to do to get the Emerald source to install in places or to recognize the rest of the Compiz stuff already on the system so that it will be able to work properly with the Debian Compiz Fusion installation.
For example, do I tell configure to install to /usr/local as we normally would? Or do I tell it to install into the system standard /usr, since none of the other Compiz stuff is in /usr/local? The standard thing to do is to use /usr/local for any out of package management tarball installations, but there are some packages that need to install into the standard system folders instead in order to function properly if they are not stand-alone applications. And Emerald, I don't think, is a stand-alone thing as it must jive with the rest of the Compiz programs.
There is also the matter of a dependency, something called libemerald-decoration0 and the same -dev package or something like that, that I recall coming as separate packages when I was using Shame's Compiz Fusion repositories. Of course there is nothing like that in Debian since they do not include Emerald as part of the distro. Does that come with the emerald source package?
There's just got to be a way to get it working. Be aware that the official Debian Compiz Fusion is a newer git version of the packages, not the official Compiz and Compiz Fusion release. They just chose a git they felt fixed up bugs enough and used that, along with many of the Compiz Fusion plugins, like compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported, in order to include as much of Compiz Fusion that they could and have it be rock solid stable at the same time. I have no idea which git versions of things they chose as they just gave everything the same version numbers as the last official Compiz Fusion release. Kind of like they forked Compiz Fusion with their own version.
Whatever they did, it works great and there are loads of plugins available so it was a very nice job. The only thing that doesn't work are the icons within ccsm, even with the appropriate packages installed that are supposed to make them appear, much like happens in Slackware with ccsm. I just get red X's where the icons are supposed to be. This is only a bug in the appearance of ccsm, as all the functionality works perfectly. Just looks weird.
Do you have any suggestions for me? I could just try using the normal prefix /usr/local first to see what happens, but I thought it safer to ask for help first. This way, if there are any caveats I should be aware of you can let me know before I begin. Like, if you think this can't possibly work so don't bother. That's one reasonable caveat there! I just don't know, and I like to know as much as possible before installing stuff.
Although I have mostly used the kde decorator in KDE and the gtk decorator in Gnome, I do have a collection of favorite Emerald decorations that I enjoy using as well. Seems a shame to say goodbye forever to these, but with Debian choosing not to ship Emerald as part of its supported packages this is the situation presently.
I'd like to work around that, at least until new final releases with whatever new Compiz-Fusion decorator is finalized and included in a package that Debian can feel is suitable comes down the pipe.
The official Debian packages include separate development packages for each of the Compiz and Compiz Fusion packages and I have those installed, including libdecoration0-dev. I was brainstorming that if I could go through the list of dependencies for building Compiz Fusion that is in the Compiz Fusion wiki and make sure I have all of those installed, that there shouldn't be much of a problem in building and installing emerald and emerald-themes from the 0.5.2 source tarballs.
My concern of course is whether there is something out of the ordinary I will need to do to get the Emerald source to install in places or to recognize the rest of the Compiz stuff already on the system so that it will be able to work properly with the Debian Compiz Fusion installation.
For example, do I tell configure to install to /usr/local as we normally would? Or do I tell it to install into the system standard /usr, since none of the other Compiz stuff is in /usr/local? The standard thing to do is to use /usr/local for any out of package management tarball installations, but there are some packages that need to install into the standard system folders instead in order to function properly if they are not stand-alone applications. And Emerald, I don't think, is a stand-alone thing as it must jive with the rest of the Compiz programs.
There is also the matter of a dependency, something called libemerald-decoration0 and the same -dev package or something like that, that I recall coming as separate packages when I was using Shame's Compiz Fusion repositories. Of course there is nothing like that in Debian since they do not include Emerald as part of the distro. Does that come with the emerald source package?
There's just got to be a way to get it working. Be aware that the official Debian Compiz Fusion is a newer git version of the packages, not the official Compiz and Compiz Fusion release. They just chose a git they felt fixed up bugs enough and used that, along with many of the Compiz Fusion plugins, like compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported, in order to include as much of Compiz Fusion that they could and have it be rock solid stable at the same time. I have no idea which git versions of things they chose as they just gave everything the same version numbers as the last official Compiz Fusion release. Kind of like they forked Compiz Fusion with their own version.
Whatever they did, it works great and there are loads of plugins available so it was a very nice job. The only thing that doesn't work are the icons within ccsm, even with the appropriate packages installed that are supposed to make them appear, much like happens in Slackware with ccsm. I just get red X's where the icons are supposed to be. This is only a bug in the appearance of ccsm, as all the functionality works perfectly. Just looks weird.
Do you have any suggestions for me? I could just try using the normal prefix /usr/local first to see what happens, but I thought it safer to ask for help first. This way, if there are any caveats I should be aware of you can let me know before I begin. Like, if you think this can't possibly work so don't bother. That's one reasonable caveat there! I just don't know, and I like to know as much as possible before installing stuff.