EDE on Arch Linux

When installing EDE on an Arch Linux machine you can choose between using a custom repository provided by EDE or building the packages yourself. Using the former method, Arch's package manager (pacman) can take care of updating EDE if a new version is released on the EDE repository.

Note: All packages in the EDE repository are currently unsigned!

The EDE repository holds packages for both i686 and x86_64.

EDE for Arch comes split into six packages:

• edelib - EDE's support library which implements functions not provided by FLTK
• ede-common - Platform independent data for EDE (e.g. icons)
• ede-wm - EDE's window manager (a slightly modified PekWM)
• ede-bin - EDE binaries
• ede-doc - Optional documentation package
• ede-wallpapers - Optional wallpaper package

Installing EDE can be done in 4 simple steps:

1. Open your pacman configuration file (/etc/pacman.conf) with your favorite editor (and root privileges!)
2. Add the following lines to it (you can just leave the $arch variable as it is; your system knows it):

     [ede]
     SigLevel = Optional
     Server = http://ede.elderlinux.org/repos/archlinux/$arch

3. Update pacman database files by invoking: pacman -Syy
4. Simply install any package or the entire EDE group like any other package. E.g.: pacman -S ede

Even though the number of packages has changed, you can simply update EDE 2.0 to version 2.1 with the new binary packages. The package ede-bin replaces the former ede package.

Note: The repository URL has changed with the release of version 2.1. Make sure to enter the correct one in your pacman.conf.

If you made sure that the new URL is provided in pacman.conf, pacman will pick up the new packages during the next update. You can do an update by simply issuing pacman -Syyu (with root privileges) on a terminal.

If you're experiencing difficulties in installing from the repository, it might help tp add the lines mentioned above at the beginning of the file pacman.conf instead of appending them at the end.

For Arch Linux there are two PKGBUILD files available in the AUR: edelib and ede. You can download those and use makepkg to create packages yourself (this will currently create only two packages instead of six as in our repository).

Alternatively you can of course follow the generic building procedure, too: InstallingFromSource.

You can either use a graphical login manager to bring up EDE or simply use Xorg's startx command.

Make sure you have installed the package xorg-xinit in the later case. It is not part of xorg-server on Arch Linux!

If you want to use startx, just create a new file .xinitrc with the content exec startede in your home directory. You can do so with the following command:

cd ~ && echo "exec startede" > .xinitrc