Installing EDE on Slackware

For Slackware there are two SlackBuilds abailable on http://slackbuilds.org/: edelib and ede. You can use them to easily build packages managable by Slack's package manager.

EDE comes with its own version of PekWM. If you've already installed it on your system the two will conflict.

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

A few words on dependencies: EDE needs edelib which depends on FLTK (and both EDE packages use jam during the build process). EDE works with both FLTK 1.1 and FLTK 1.3. 1.1 is really old now and lacks a few important features. If you don't have any special needs, just stick with 1.3. But the choice is yours of course.

First create a working directory and change to it. Then download the needed SlackBuilds. You can download them with any browser or with the following console commands (download fltk.tar.gz instead if you really want FLTK 1.1):

wget http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/14.0/development/ftjam.tar.gz
wget http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/14.0/libraries/fltk13.tar.gz
wget http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/14.0/libraries/edelib.tar.gz
wget http://slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/14.0/desktop/ede.tar.gz

Building a package from a SlackBuild is as easy as decompressing the gzipped tar archive, changing to the new directory, examine $package.info for the source URL, download the source archive and executing the $package.SlackBuild.

To build the FTJAM package do the following:

tar xvzf ftjam.tar.gz
cd ftjam
wget `cat *.info | grep DOWNLOAD= | sed -e 's;DOWNLOAD=;;' -e 's;";;g'`
./ftjam.SlackBuild

Either copy the third command or mind the ' and ` characters! Otherwise it won't work.

After all is done, the last line shows the path and name of the newly created package. Install it with this command (of course filling in the correct path and filename):

installpkg /path/filename

Next do the same for the fltk13 package. This one however was written in a way so that it may co-exist with version 1.1 on the same system. For that reason it installs in a non-default directory and also renames some files. Thanks to these changes EDE won't be able to find it so we have to patch the SlackBuild to use the default values. Issue the following command before you run the fltk13.SlackBuild file:

sed -i -e 's;/fltk13;;g' -e 's;mv;#mv;g' -e 's;sed -i ";#sed -i ";g' fltk13.SlackBuild
./fltk13SlackBuild

Once the package has been created, install it. Then build and install edelib and finally EDE accordingly.

You can either use a graphical login manager to bring up EDE or simply use Xorg's startx command. If you want to use startx, edit the file .xinitrc in your user's home directory. Remove whatever other DE or WM is gets started and then add exec startede instead. That's it.