Precompiled XFCE Unix binaries for the RS/6000 and Sun SPARC Architecture
by Marc O. Gloor

The XFCE window manager

Click here to see XFCE in action on my Sun Sparcstation. XFCE is a lightweight desktop environment (similar to CDE) for various Unix supercomputers, midframe- and desktop environments. After successfully installing xfce on several i586 Linux boxes and on my multinode mosix cluster, I installed xfce also on our RS/6000 (running AIX) and on my Sun SPARC 5 (running linux) because I needed a simple, light and efficient desktop for my Unix Systems (both, at work and at home). There are precompiled binary distributions available from this website (see below).
 

SPARC Note

The Sparc binaries are linked against glibc2.0 (not glibc2.1), glib, gtk and/or libxpm and/or libungif.
 

AIX Note:

Compiling xfce on RS/6000 AIX was a bit tricky because of a Gtk+ bug in release 1.2.8 an earlier versions. After successfully compiling glib, gtk and xfce on my AIX 4.3.3, the xfce binaries produce a "sigsegv caught" panic (debuger output: 0xd1815e50 in gdk_set_locale () at gdkim.c:101). I found a solution about this: AIX shared library support doesn't permit unresolved symbols in a shared library. The problem here is that libgtk depends on libgdk, but it doesn't have -lgdk when it's built. I'm not sure what the right fix is, since it looks like gtk/Makefile.am and configure.in will need to be altered to support this quirk. However, here's what I did to get gtk+-1.2.8 to work well with gcc-2.95.2 on AIX 4.3.3:

./configure --with-locale=C
make
rm -f gdk/libgdk.la gtk/libgtk.la
# Next add "-lgdk " before "-lgmodule" in libgtk_la_LDFLAGS defined in gtk/Makefile
make install
So it's important you compile Gtk+ the same way on your System (workaround). It's a good idea to deactivate "Show subprocess diagnostic dialog" after installing xfce on your RS/6000. Please report bugs to marc_dot_gloor_at_u_dot_nus_dot_edu. Happy hacking.
 

Download

Precompiled binaries for...


Related links


Licence

Precompiled binary distributions are licensed under the General Public License.
 

Thanks

To Olivier Fourdan and the xfce community. 

$Id: xfce-everywhere.html,v 1.17 2020/11/21 11:13:30 gloor Exp $
Author: marc_dot_gloor_at_u_dot_nus_dot_edu
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