Installation

Download :

Visit the SourceForge project page to download release files or use other Sourceforge tools. If you want to get developmental versions ahead of releases, use git. For versions prior to 1.19.0 use svn (subversion). The actual command you will probably want to use to check out a snapshot is:

git clone git://roxterm.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/roxterm/roxterm

Requirements :

You need the libraries for GTK+2 which is pretty much standard on all free Unix derivatives these days, and/or GTK+3. It needs at least version 2.16 of glib and GTK+ 2.18. You will also need vte/libvte (at least version 0.20), a Gnome component; most distros package separate versions for GTK+2 and GTK+3. D-BUS is also required (see below).

To compile ROXTerm you will need the header files for the above libraries. In packaging systems they usually come in packages whose names end in "-dev" or "-devel".

ROXTerm uses a new, bespoke build system called maitch. This requires python and the python 'lockfile' module.

D-Bus

D-Bus is a messaging system which ROXTerm uses to connect terminals with its configure tool. ROXTerm uses the "session" bus, which should be started along with your desktop environment. Current versions of ROX, GNOME and KDE session managers all launch D-Bus. If you use some other session/desktop/window manager which doesn't launch D-Bus you can start it by inserting something like this near the start of your .xinitrc or .xsession:

if test -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ; then eval `dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session` export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS fi

The reason for using a bespoke configuration messaging system over D-Bus instead of gconf is because gconf doesn't provide a way to map an arbitrary number of profiles onto configuration filenames.

Installing :

To install ROXTerm for ROX all you need to do is unpack the tarball in your Apps directory and run it from there, but you will probably want to rename the folder to ROXTerm. For other systems ROXTerm may be installed in a similar way to an autoconf-based source package, but using maitch's analogues:

python ./mscript.py configure python ./mscript.py build python ./mscript.py install

Various options are available, run

python ./mscript.py help

for details.

Autoconf builds are still supported, but deprecated. If you are using a version fetched by git instead of a release tarball run the bootstrap.sh script first to create the configure script and various other files needed for building.

Debian & Ubuntu

Up-to-date official Debian packages are now available. See http://packages.debian.org/roxterm. For those that want to build their own debian packages, the debian packaging files are now maintained in separate branches of the git repository, managed by git-buildpackage (gbp). gbp has its own documentation but some points you need to know when using it to build roxterm:

  • gbp's master branch is "debian" or "lucid".
  • The lucid branch is for distros lacking support for the GTK3 version (eg Debian Squeeze, Ubuntu Maverick and earlier).
  • For building snapshots between releases you may additionally need imagemagick and librsvg2-bin, but these don't work together properly in Lucid.

Ubuntu also has official roxterm packages, but due to Ubuntu's release cycle these may lag behind the latest upstream releases. Therefore I have set up a PPA to provide the most recent releases of ROXTerm for Ubuntu's current release when appropriate.