Short documentation
There is three ways to install Equinox Desktop Environment. First is to download binary packages for your distribution, second is to download source tarballs and third is to download it from repository and compile it. For first option, please consult your's distribution installation system and for other two, compilation is the same.
Note that EDE require eFLTK (extended FLTK) library. This library is improved FLTK 2.0 library with many changes and core modifications. To build it, you don't need FLTK 2.0 source, eFLTK already incorporate it. You can download it from standard project page.
Here is few steps how to build eFLTK and EDE (EDE will be exactly as you build eFLTK).
After downloading, unpack it, and run:
./configure
You can check additional options with:
./configure --help
In the usual way, configure will build eFLTK with MySQL and unixODBC support. EDE does not use it, so you can safely disable it. Option:
./configure --disable-mysql --disable-unixODBC will
do the job. eFLTK support xft (font anti-aliasing) too. Building with this option EDE will have it too. Xft in older X versions, especially in XFree86 was very buggy and in that case the best way is to leave it. On other hand, newer distributions ships with X.org's server, that have very good xft support. In that case, command:
./configure --enable-xft
will happily include it.
If you find spare time and decide to help us, proposal way is to build eFLTK and EDE with debug support. This will create bigger and slower executable files, but in the case of odd behaviors and crashing output will be more descriptive which will enable us easily finding the bugs.
./configure --enable-debug
is that option.
After configure do it's job, running:
make
will start the compilation process. Time spending in it depends on processor's speed. When it is done, installation (as root) goes with:
make install
EDE building is the same as for eFLTK, except for configure options. Debugging is usually supported with
./configure --enable-debug
flag. Other flags are:
./configure --disable-silent
which will remove those Compiling something... console output string, replacing with full compiler command
line. This can be very useful (for debugging too) in case compiler starts to act weird. Classical
make
and
make install
after configure finished will place EDE where should be.
Last option left to be done is to place in your's local .xinitrc file
startede
line. This will invoke script with the same name which will start various programs that are part of desktop
environment. Command
startx
will start X server and pull commands from your's .xinitrc file.
As can be seen, EDE supports themes and window decorations.
Each theme contain few XPM images and text *default.theme file, which describes window manager how theme should look. Here is example of default.theme file:
[Theme] Frame color=RGB(129,153,177) Title image=title.xpm Close image up=close.xpm Close image down=closeD.xpm Maximize image up=max.xpm Maximize image down=maxD.xpm Minimize image up=min.xpm Minimize image down=minD.xpm
Frame color describes color that will left, right and bottom window frames use. If you ask yourself about top frame, don't worry, Title image variable will fill it.
RGB(129, 153, 177) describes percent of red, green and blue color respectively. So here we have red = 129, green = 153 and blue = 177. With combination of these basic three colors you can get various color schemes.
Title image is ordinary XPM image that will be used to decorate window title. It will be tiled (remember this !).
Close image up will be use to decorate close button; button placed on top-right window frame. This variable describe how close button will look when you don't press it.
Close image down same as above, except that this image will be used when mouse press button.
Maximize image up, Maximize image down, Minimize image up and Minimize image down, do (guess :)) like described for Close button.
