Hi Alex, Nice work, and thank you for documenting the illumos-specific build issues; that kind of detail is exactly what makes future porting efforts tractable.
One question on priorities: is this build primarily aimed at older or legacy hardware configurations? My view is that engineering effort would be better directed toward the DRM/KMS driver stack, amdgpu and other newer GPUs in particular, for current or even slightly older generation hardware, since that is the long-term constraint on this distribution's viability as a desktop platform. Once hardware-accelerated graphics are in place, any modern DE becomes considerably more practical to run day to day, rather than falling back to the static EFI framebuffer. Regards, Atiq On 9/15/26 18:00, Goetz T. Fischer via openindiana-discuss wrote: > very nice contribution. and playing an old deepdance in the process is > a plus for sure :-D > > On 16. Sep 2026 at 00:33:14 CEST, Alex Gorouvein <[email protected]> > wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> I wanted to share a successful build of XFCE 4.20 on OpenIndiana >> Hipster 2026.04 (in a VirtualBox VM), in case it's useful to anyone >> else or of interest for packaging. >> >> I'd previously built XFCE 4.10 on Solaris 10 from source, and expected >> something similar here but OI's pkg repos already provide most of >> the GTK2/GTK3/glib2/D-Bus/VTE dependency chain, so most of the actual >> work was building XFCE's own ~13 core components from source >> (libxfce4util, xfconf, libxfce4ui, libxfce4windowing, Exo, garcon, >> xfwm4, xfce4-panel, xfce4-session, xfdesktop, Thunar, xfce4-terminal, >> plus a couple of new upstream deps like libdisplay-info and >> xfce4-dev-tools). >> >> A few illumos-specific issues came up that might be worth documenting >> somewhere if they aren't already: >> >> - illumos's native linker doesn't support GNU's --version-script >> flag, which several Meson-based projects pass unconditionally. Had to >> patch meson.build files directly to drop it (setting the >> version-script args to an empty list) rather than swap the system >> linker, since GCC's own internal Solaris-mapfile-based linking >> depends on the native ld staying in place. >> - Runtime linking to a non-standard prefix (/opt/xfce) needed crle >> -64 -l ... /opt/xfce/lib, since illumos's runtime linker doesn't scan >> arbitrary prefixes automatically. >> - xfce4-session doesn't reliably auto-launch a D-Bus session bus in a >> LightDM-launched session on this install wrapping the session >> launch in dbus-run-session explicitly fixed a ~45-second >> hang-then-fail on login. >> >> Happy to write up fuller build notes if there's interest, and would >> be glad to help if anyone wants to work toward getting this packaged >> properly (IPS package, or similar) for OI, since XFCE currently shows >> as "community help wanted" rather than officially maintained. >> >> Screenshots attached. >> >> Thanks, >> Alex _______________________________________________ openindiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
