I LOVE this project! I was very excited to try it out, so I downloaded a CentOS 8 install DVD image, installed CentOS in a VM, then began following the INSTALL instructions from the NsCDE GIT repo. About forty minutes later, I was only about halfway done. Also, I ran into more than one issue, and I had to make choices while installing packages, which I was unsure about, and I have no idea if they would have caused the whole thing to not work.
Would it be possible to release a distro at some point? I’d love to try it.
Either way, thank you for making and releasing this awesome project!
Hi robot,
if you’re willing to try another distro to run NsCDE under, I can suggest arch. I installed NsCDE from git and only had to manually install about a handful of really small python packages, so I assume most of the needed stuff’s already there on a standard arch install with basic python support. The whole install process took decidedly less than half an hour, all the waiting for things to happen and returning to press buttons included.
There are couple of answers I can give you on this topic:
CentOS 8 or RHEL 8 are more server distros. Personally, I develop on CentOS 7, which with time got full epel and plenty of repositories with 3rd party packages. This will probably be the case with CenOS/RHEL 8, but maybe next year. NsCDE is easier to install on Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and Fedora 28-31 and such. I even managed to test-install it on ClearOS, Mint Linux and such. It works on FreeBSD too, for which I had to make additional effort for portability. Basically, you need to run “./Installer.ksh -w -i” and when it complains about python modules, just search them with package manager and install, repeat until there are no more complaints. Everything ends up in /opt/NsCDE except nscde.desktop in /usr/share/xsessions and icon theme symlink in /usr/local/share/icons. From other stuff, you need ImageMagick, xscreensaver, xterm, stalonetray, xsettingsd and maybe gtk3-nocsd, dex-autorun … mate-terminal is a good choice like some modern version of dtterm with this setup. And of course Korn shell and Fvwm.
For a start, you can run it on some Debian, Arch or Fedora in VM. CentOS/RHEL has kvm …
I will for sure NOT hijack some distro and call it NsCDE-tutuntu or NsCDEbian or such just to have it with removed default DE, and 2-3 addon packages. It will be a hype of the month, but it is tedious to maintain even remotely serious OS distro just because of that. This doesn’t make any sense.
Reorganization of the paths is for NsCDE post-1.0 milestone. It will be organized to fit more closely into the system (in /usr/lib, /usr/share, /usr/libexec/NsCDE etc …) and hence more suitable for packaging. But then again, if such package is not in some repository, you will have to install package depenednices prior to that.
So, just do:
grep -A 3 “for pymodule” Installer.ksh and you will see what needs to be installed with yum/dnf/apt/pacman. and then do
./Installer.ksh -w -i
Regular upgrades are done with:
./Installer.ksh -w -n -u
And you can log in to NsCDE session where setup wizard will wait you, followed by Color Style Manager. Log out and log in after that, and you are set up. For more, click last subpanel and RTFM.
