Problems installing Xfce to a custom location

[David Mohr]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Jannis Pohlmann <jannis at xfce.org> wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> I just played with the installer again and installed
> Xfce to /home/local/. Now even though we added environment variables
> for glade to xinitrc, nothing really works. I know it's a setup that we
> should not really encourage but still, maybe we can get it to work.
>
> There are three problems (still counting):
>
>  1. On some (maybe on a lot of) systems, startxfce4 does not run our
>     xinitrc script. As a result, the glade variables are not set and
>     all the settings dialogs don't work. Shouldn't we set these
>     variables in startxfce4 then?
>
>  2. startxfce4 doesn't adjust PATH although it would make sense to add
>     something like
>
>       PATH="$PATH:$(basename $0)"
>
>     to it so that it finds the rest of Xfce if everything is installed
>     to a custom location.

I have never used the installer, but shouldn't this issue have existed
for the 4.4 installer as well? How was it handled there?

If you can't find a nice solution, then I think a notice in the README
should be appropriate for this, shouldn't it be? Or alternatively the
installer could ask to create symlinks into a directory of one's
choice for all the binaries, i.e. ~/bin .

~David

>  3. D-Bus doesn't know about the xfconfd binary if it's installed to a
>     custom location. Is there a way for users to tell D-Bus where it
>     is without the need of root permissions?
>
> I'd be happy to get these things sorted out (if that's possible at all)
> because I remember that part of the early popularity of Xfce 4.4 was
> due to the installers and those are usually run as normal users.
>
>  - Jannis
>
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