[OpenIndiana-discuss] XFCE 4.20 built from source on OpenIndiana Hipster 2026.04

[Alex Gorouvein]

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
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