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

[Atiq Rahman]

Hi Alex,
Nice work, and thank you for documenting the illumos-specific build issues;
that kind of detail is exactly what makes future porting efforts tractable.

One question on priorities: is this build primarily aimed at older or
legacy hardware configurations? My view is that engineering effort would
be better directed toward the DRM/KMS driver stack, amdgpu and other
newer GPUs in particular, for current or even slightly older generation
hardware, since that is the long-term constraint on this distribution's
viability as a desktop platform.

Once hardware-accelerated graphics are in place, any modern DE becomes
considerably more practical to run day to day, rather than falling back
to the static EFI framebuffer.

Regards,
Atiq

On 9/15/26 18:00, Goetz T. Fischer via openindiana-discuss wrote:
 > 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