[openbox] RedHat 8.0

[Alexander Volovics]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 10:12:25AM -0500, Daniel Ems wrote:

> I can't compile openbox 2.1.2 on RedHat 8.0
> The configure works correctly, but make fails.  Here's the error:

Openbox-2.1.2 does compile on RH-8.0. Some time ago I stated the
same problem om this list and was helped by John Eckerdal.

As you can't access the archives I'll give a summary:

The problem exists because RH-8.0 has changed from Xft (=Xft1)
to Xft2/fontconfig.

Not only have the locations of the relevant libs been changed 
(for example "libXft.so..." is no longer to be found in /usr/X11R6/lib/
 but in /usr/lib/ and "Xft.h" is no longer to be found in
 /usr/X11R6/include/X11/Xft but in /usr/include/Xft2/X11/)
process but also "Xft.h" from Xft-devel in RH-8.0 contains some
other 'structures' than the old Xft.h from XFree86-devel-4.2.0.

The solution is to use the shell script 'xft-config' from Xft-devel
to display the necessary CPPFLAGS, CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS, namely:

$ xft-config --libs
-lXft2 -lfreetype -lfontconfig -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lXrender
$ xft-config --cflags
-I/usr/include/Xft2 -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include -I/usr/X11R6/include

John Eckerdal's solutions was to
1) run ./configure
2) edit 'config.h' and change /*enable support of the Xft extension*/
   from /* #undef XFT */ to #define XFT 1
3) edit Makefile in /src and add:
   `xft-config --libs` to the line "openbox_LDFLAGS ="
   `xft-config --cflags` to the end of the line "CXXFLAGS = -g...."
4) edit Makefile in /util and add:
   `xft-config --cflags` to the end of the line "CXXFLAGS = -g...."
   I also added `xft-config --libs` to the lines with
   "xftlsfonts_LDFLAGS =" and "bsetroot_LDFLAGS ="
   (I don't know if these last two are strictly necessay. xftlsfonts
    refuses to compile anyway)
5) do make and make install

REMARK the double `` in the above lines with xft-config!

This compiles openbox, epist, bsetroot and they then work OK under
RH-8.0 and you can use TT fonts in the styles.
(however "dropShadowFonts" does not seem to work).

There are probably more elegant ways to do this but this works.
However make still seems to grumble about some of the 'structures'
in Xft.h not being recognized. I have not noticed any lack of
functionality in openbox though.

It would be very nice if the developers could look into adding
Xft2/fontconfig support for openbox.
Xft2/fontconfig makes the handling of freetype fonts so much more
elegant and easy under Linux. It is going to be the future anyway.

You can download and install the necessary xft/fontconfig libs under your
own distribution by downloading fcpackage.2_0.tar.gz from fontconfig.org.

Alexander