XView

What is XView

XView (X Window-System-based Visual/Integrated Environment for Workstations) is a user-interface toolkit to support interactive, graphics-based applications running under the X Window System. XView provides a set of pre-built, user-interface objects such as canvases, scrollbars, menus, and control panels. The appearance and functionality of these objects follow the OPEN LOOK Graphical User Interface (GUI) specification. XView features an object-oriented style Application Programmer's Interface (API) that is straightforward and easy to learn.

Why is this code on Github?

For a long winded explation of why this repo exists, see why.md

The short version is: Since xview (and hence olvwm) are no longer available on Debian/Ubuntu, this is just a copy of the xview code previously available on Debian + the existing Debian patches + additional patches to get olvwm, olwm and clock working on 64-bit x86

For a list of recent changes, run git log -p

BUILD/INSTALL

0. Install the build/header/library packages required for the build:

On distros other than Ubuntu:

For distros other than Ubuntu, run make -n dep and install the equivalents of the packages listed in the output. The required packages are:

• xutils-dev # for imake, X Window System utility programs for development
• libx11-dev # X11 client-side library (development headers)
• libxt-dev # X11 toolkit intrinsics library (development headers)
• libxext-dev # X11 miscellaneous extensions library (development headers)
• libxpm-dev # X11 pixmap library (development headers)
• bison # YACC-compatible parser generator
• flex # fast lexical analyzer generator

On Ubuntu:

sudo make dep # Note: yeah, this only works on Ubuntu/compatibles.

1. Next, start off by cloning this repo:

git clone https://github.com/olvwm/xview

2. Now you are ready to start with the build. First cd into the repo:

cd xview

3. The default build is done by running make:

make

4. (An optional install step) If you want the generated binaries/libraries/header files in /usr/openwin:

sudo make install

Testing olvwm under Xnest/Xephyr:

Preparation:

You can run the window manager (or any of the other applications) by using the absolute path or by appending /usr/openwin/bin to the PATH (assuming the binaries have been installed there).

For the binaries that have libxview/libolgx library dependencies, set LD_LIBRARY_PATH appropriately. (If the make install step shown above was done, you just need to add /usr/openwin/lib to LD_LIBRARY_PATH)

For example, assuming you are using bash and assuming everything has been installed in /usr/openwin/{bin,lib}, add the following to your .bashrc:

    export PATH=$PATH:/usr/openwin/bin
    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/openwin/lib

Test run:

You can start the nested X server using: Xephyr :1 # or Xnest :1

You can test the window manager within the nested X server by running: olvwm -f -display :1

To use olvwm as the default window manager:

See olvwm on Ubuntu

LICENSE

All the source code copied over from Debian or patched using the Debian patches is copyright by the authors or patch providers, as described in copyright, legal notice or COPYING files in each program's top-level directory and/or in the source files themselves.

All additional patches or contributions made on top of the existing code, specifically, all changes that were made to the code after git commit id 6e1142503013ec9106199591b1353776a6b2bcf6 are licensed under GPLv3 as described in LICENSE

See also

There are a couple of other folks who also seem to be interested in maintaining or at least keeping copies of the xview (and/or olvwm) code. I've documented the ones that are available on Github in awesome_xview.md

If you find any other such resources, please feel free to send in a pull request