X Windows System Administrator's Guide, Vol 8 (Definitive Guides to the X Window System)

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Compiling Public Domain Software

Public domain software for X is available all over the Internet, but you may not think you have the right programming skills, or no one ever explicitly told you what to do. This appendix is a tutorial on how to find and compile public domain software.

In This Appendix:

Finding the Sources

Using an Archie Server

Get the FAQ

The Usual Suspects

An Example: xarchie

Getting the xarchie Sources

Untarring the Sources

Editing the Imakefile

Compiling the Source

Using Patches

Another Example: xkeycaps

Related Documentation

B

Compiling Public Domain Software

You've probably seen this sort of talk over the newsgroups: “Does anyone know where I can get xtetris?” “Is there an ftp site for xpostit?” You know that one of the best things about X is that there's all this great public domain software available, but you're not sure how to go about getting it. Either you don't know how to ftp the sources, or you don't know how to use imake or make, or you aren't much of a C programmer so the whole idea of dealing with the source just scares you.

Well, the good news is that for most source distributions, you don't need to know very much about make or imake, and you don't really need to know much about programming in C—mostly all you need to know is how to follow directions. This appendix gives you some idea of how to compile sources without knowing a lot about what you're doing. If you've been installing X from source or if you're a competent (and confident) C programmer ...