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

[Goetz T. Fischer]

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 <agorouvein at gmail.com> 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
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