Continuing from where I left in part 1 with a functional X Windows System, it's time to aim for something closer to a usable system.
16 May 2022 - GTK+ 2
I cloned the VM to have a checkpoint to restart from in case anything went horribly wrong. At this point there are many possible paths but I decided to go for LXDE due to its small memory footprint and dependencies compared to other more mainstream desktop environments.
Building GTK+ 2
GTK+ is the centerpiece for all graphics used in LXDE. I started with version 2. As explained in the guide, some libraries will need to be rebuilt with extra support previously disabled. On that note I had to rebuild cairo, pango, harfbuzz due to the later addition of gobject-introspection.
GTK+ 2 up and running from the demo app.
Quick gotcha: ISO Codes source code was not available from the proposed location, instead I got it from http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/i/iso-codes/iso-codes_4.9.0.orig.tar.xz not a big issue but it required a bit of googling around.
I wanted to see if it was possible to build LXDE with GTK+ version 3, so I built GTK+ 3, here is how it looks from the demo app.
17 May 2022
LSB Tools link is broken it gives 404, instead of releases, I got it from Github repositor tags page https://github.com/djlucas/LSB-Tools/archive/refs/tags/v0.9.tar.gz
Building apps with GTK+ 3 support.
Building LXSession
./configure \ --prefix=/usr \ --enable-gtk3 \ --enable-buildin-clipboard \ --enable-buildin-polkit
Building PCManFM
./configure \ --prefix=/usr \ --sysconfdir=/etc \ --with-gtk=3
Building libindicator-12.10.1
It has a bug which is allegedly fixed, however, I could find the issue in the source code I downloaded from https://launchpad.net/libindicator/+download as per this comment. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=806470.
CFLAGS=-Wno-error ./configure \ --prefix=/usr \ --with-gtk=3 \ --enable-deprecations=yes
18 May 2022
I tried many different ways to get LXPanel built with GTK+ 3 to work. Long story short, I couldn’t.
Building LXPanel (not possible to install with GTK 3)
./configure \ --prefix=/usr \ --with-plugins=-netstat
It required wireless-tools-devel.
Building libwnck, download source from: https://download.gnome.org/sources/libwnck/3.24/libwnck-3.24.1.tar.xz
./configure \ --prefix=/usr \ --disable-static
Building keybinder, download source from: https://github.com/kupferlauncher/keybinder/releases/download/keybinder-3.0-v0.3.2/keybinder-3.0-0.3.2.tar.gz
./configure --prefix=/usr
End of LXPanel, at this point all dependencies were met and LXPanel is installed.
Building LXAppearance
./configure \ --prefix=/usr \ --sysconfdir=/etc \ --enable-dbus \ --enable-gtk3
9 June 2022
I gave up on LXPanel with GTK+ 3, the main reason being that even if it installed correctly in the system, it constantly crashed randomly and this seems to be a known bug. I built libfm-gtk as well so LXPanel has a GTK+ 2 dependency built before and ./configure is happy.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) I was very busy during the following months and I couldn't spend time on this. Finally I got some spare time and I went back to it.
3rd March 2023
Installed Lightdm and lightdm-gtk-greeter.
At this point, a new problem appeared, the VM integration didn't work until I log in which is when SPICE agent runs. I added a note for future research.
I need to find out how to run spice-vdagent with lightdm or the greeter. Potentially exploring more here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LightDM.
Copying the desktop entry to the relevant location works to autostart the SPICE agent when you log in to the session.
sudo cp \ /sources/spice-vdagent-0.21.0/data/spice-vdagent.desktop \ /etc/xdg/autostart/
I installed Mousepad without any trouble.
Important note: compiling Firefox requires a lot a lot of RAM, no less than 8GB!
It also requires send-notify program to complete installation
Gtkmm - it wouldn’t compile unless disabling building documentation in all subprojects:
meson --prefix=/usr --buildtype=release .. \ -Dmm-common:use-network=true \ -Dbuild-documentation=false \ -Datkmm-1.6:build-documentation=false \ -Dcairomm-1.0:build-documentation=false \ -Dglibmm-2.4:build-documentation=false \ -Dlibsigcplusplus-2.0:build-documentation=false \ -Dpangomm-1.4:build-documentation=false
