My journey through BLFS - part 2

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 

My journey through BLFS - part 1

Having successfully finished LFS, I felt inspired to continue the journey, since all I had was a very minimal system. As I used version LFS 11.0-systemd, it only made sense to continue with the same version BLFS 11.0-systemd

15 Feb 2022 - SSH & curl

The top priority for me was to be able to connect remotely, primarily motivated by the fact that I was typing all commands from the guide since I left the chroot. OpenSSH to the rescue.

Another priority was the ability to download packages to continue building the system with new packages as I followed along, but there was no curl or wget. I could have used some bash magic or python minimal script, however, the main issue was the lack of support to download files via HTTPS. This is where make-ca, pk11-kit, GnuTLS and a few others came handy.

During all that time, I was making use of virtio 9p to share a folder with my host, this would simulate copying files manually before being able to use the network to download the rest.

6 April 2022 - LLVM compiled - required a lot of RAM

At some point I went down the rabbit hole, probably my mistake being too ambitious, building packages that I didn’t need so early in the process, but hey, that’s the learning process. A particular package that took me too deep in the dependency hell was texlive-20210325 as I was also building the documentation along with the binaries, to such extent that I decided to leave it and use the binary option (install-tl-unx) which is also huge in size.

One issue I encountered while building some of those dependencies of dependencies, I was building LLVM when all of the sudden the compiling process was killed, not enough memory. I set up 4GB swap space and tried again, to my surprise, it got killed again, so I ended up creating a swap file of 8 GB to complete the compilation process.

Other interesting milestones were:

Linux PAM - it allowed a more streamlined integration with many programs. In my particular use case, I wanted to control how I was using the “su” command without having to type root password every time and without using sudo. It also made me rebuild the whole systemd again to include PAM support.

Polkit - a somehow ubiquitous dependency for GUI apps and because it has quite a few dependencies that take some time to build like js engine, some of the next packages benefited from not having to build them as dependencies.

Having built all this, it was time to start preparing one of the most daunting parts of the whole BLFS, the X Window System !

25 April 2022 - X Window System up and running

This part is another one, where you can see yourself building and installing tons of packages and not seeing anything encouraging. It’s not until that very last moment of truth when you run startx that you see the result of all that hard work.

To my surprise, it worked the first time ! Well, not without some issues, but I have to say, the default values for xorg configuration are pretty good. Without proper graphic card drivers and barely any configuration in place, it managed to launch the X server with twm and some insanely big terminal emulators.

It took me some time to get my head around this poor man’s window manager, especially because for some reason the mouse movement was a bit awkward when the VM’s window had a different aspect ratio from the guest resolution.

Some issues I noted to fix immediately after this successful milestone:

• Mouse cursor trapped in VM’s window
• Clipboard integration host-guest
• Mouse movement impacted by VM’s window size

26 April 2022 - Qemu agent integration

All the issues above mentioned are related to the same root cause, not having the "guest drivers" running in the VM. In this case, I needed both the qemu-agent and spice-vdagent running as well as the actual kernel drivers.

In order to get spice channel working, I had to add virtio vsockets in the kernel, so that the devices /dev/virtio-ports/com.redhat.spice.0 and /dev/virtio-ports/org.qemu.guest_agent.0 were available after setting them up in VM’s hardware configuration. Together with some udev rules provided by the agent, it was all I needed to get the daemons running.

Something I found out, which is not covered in the guide (again, because it was specific to my VM scenario) when building spice-vdagent, I had to add a few extra parameters to make it work:

CFLAGS=-Wno-error ./configure \
  --prefix=/usr \
  --with-init-script=systemd \
  --with-session-info=systemd

For some reason it wasn’t recognising that it’s being compiled in a running systemd environment, so I provided the flags to force using it, also the warning being treated as errors.

The second part of the integration, as per documentation is a per X-session process spice-vdagent, which I had to somehow manually invoke, and when I did, magic happened ! The mouse cursor was free as a bird to move all over my screen. Next, figure out how to adjust the resolution and bundle everything together to run automatically when all X starts up.

This is the tweaked version of my ".xinitrc" which worked well enough to get by without having any desktop environment to handle all these tasks.

xrandr --output Virtual-0 --mode 1366x768
spice-vdagent
xrdb -load $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid gray &
xclock -g 50x50-0+0 -bw 0 &
xload -g 50x50-50+0 -bw 0 &
xterm -g 80x24+0+0 &
xterm -g 80x24+700+320 &
twm

To wrap this part up, it’s been an incredible learning experience, this time focusing on building packages that are closer to what it’s being used on a daily basis in any Linux system. This is the base to add a desktop environment which will be my next task, at this point I’m leaning towards LXDE, but I’ll keep a backup copy at this stage in case I’d like to go for a different one later on.

The journey continues.