Installing

These are instructions for the configuration, building, and installation of the Fresco windowing system.

Prerequisites

Fresco uses a number of third party libraries, which you will need to have installed before you can proceed. Please have a look at the Dependencies for a complete list. Unfortunately, quite a number of them are still in heavy development, so you may need to get the sources and compile them yourself. Respective rpm and deb packages may *not* be enough !

Downloading

There are currently three ways to download Fresco. You can check out the sources directly from CVS, download a nightly snapshot, or you can get release packages.

Configuration

In case you use the CVS version, you have to step into the top-level source directory ('Fresco'), and call

Decide where to build Fresco, either inside the source tree (let's refer to this as $fresco-src), or (the recommended way), in a separate build directory ($fresco-build). Step into the build directory, and run configure:

this will set up the build tree and check for the available packages.

[ Add support for interactive configuration and document the options here. There is a configure for each of Prague, Fresco etc., all invoked by the top-level configure. ]

Building

Run make. As make produces a lot of noise, you may want to suppress that, i.e. run make 'silently'. It still prints out what it is doing, so you can keep track of things:

Installing

To install Fresco into the path you specified during configure run:

Running

You should now find some libraries in $prefix/lib, modules in $prefix/module, and binaries in $prefix/bin. If you want to run fresco at this place, you have to tell the loader where to look for the libraries, and, in case you use the python environment, tell python where to find the fresco modules:

or similar depending on your shell. The fresco server is in $prefix/bin/server. Use

Voila! That should run the server. You may want to try this:

Troubleshooting

There are a couple of places which are frequently subject to problems. Please consult the FAQ, and please be sure that third party libraries are correctly installed before you post about a bug. For example, the by far most frequent problem encountered is reported by people who forgot to start the name server... (this shouldn't be a problem any longer!).

Another common problem are missing fonts. The fresco server checks its for true-type and type 1 fonts (and other fonts supported by freetype) in the directories specified in fontpath in $prefix/etc/berlinrc. You may need to adapt this path to match up with your system's font directories.

Good luck, Stefan