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

[Alex Gorouvein]

Hi Atiq,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, and fair question.

Honestly, this wasn't driven by a view on where the project's engineering
effort should go strategically — it's more of a personal retro-computing
project. I've been into UNIX/Linux since the early 90s, and getting a
modern XFCE running cleanly on illumos from source was mostly just
something I wanted to do and document, in case the build notes save someone
else the trial-and-error.

That said, I don't disagree with your point. Framebuffer-only graphics is a
real ceiling on how pleasant any DE is to use day to day, and DRM/KMS +
amdgpu support would matter a lot more for OpenIndiana's viability as a
daily desktop than another desktop environment build. That's a much bigger
undertaking than what I did here though — kernel-level driver work rather
than a userland build — so it's not something I'm equipped to take on
myself, but I agree it's the more impactful direction if someone with the
right kernel background wanted to push on it.

In the meantime, I'm actually about to test this build on real (if old)
hardware — I've got OpenIndiana installed on an Acer Aspire V5-571 laptop
now, network connected, and I'm planning to package the XFCE build so I can
install it there and see how it holds up outside a VM. I'll report back
once I've done that; might be a useful data point either way, even if it's
squarely legacy hardware rather than the newer GPUs you're pointing at.

Thanks again for engaging with the post.

Best,
Alex

On Tue, Sep 22, 2026 at 5:47 PM Atiq Rahman via openindiana-discuss <
openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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