On the road to AWN in FreeBSD

Well, the guy I emailed (in Germany, I believe) got back to me with some help and I progessed a bit further but still not quite there.
The emails I sent him (before and after doing what he suggested) should be on my Gmail page (posts to Mark Daniel Reidel 4/03/08) which gives a good summary as to where I am right now.
I hope to get some further tips from him which should see AWN working in FreeBSD which would be nice.

The emails (without attachments) are here below:

Hi Mark,

Thank you very much for responding to my email. I really appreciate you taking the time to help me out.

I believe I have since made a little progess with AWN but it is still not functional on my computer within FreeBSD. Here's what happened:

1. Based on some errors I got during the configuration stage, I installed both /lang/vara and /devel/py-xdg from /usr/ports/. Then I used a variant of what you suggested for the configuration command:
./configure LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib"
and the configuration seemed to go to completion without errors. I have appended the terminal output during the configuration step in the file named "configure"
2. Then I did the compilation with "make" but this gave some errors that I didn't fully understand. The terminal output during the make step is shown in appended file named "make".
3. Finally I did a "make install" and this proceded with some further errors as shown in the output file named "make_install".
4. A "ldconfig" went without any output but I could not find avant-window-navigator anywhere on the system after this.
I'd be grateful for your opinion as to what I might need to eliminate the errors in the make and make install steps.
Thanks a lot and best wishes
Paul

On Tue, 4 Mar 2008 10:15:15 +0000 "Paul Hackett"
wrote:

> 5. Then tried to configure using ./configure
>
> 6. The configuration proceeeded for a short while and then errored out with:
> > ============================================================================
> > ERROR!
> > You probably have to install the development version of the Python package
> > for your distribution. The exact name of this package varies among them.
> > ======================================================

> I have tried this in both FreeBSD 6.3 and FreeBSD 7.0 but am unable to make
> any progress.
> I have been using AWN in many linux distros over about 15 months and would
> dearly love to get it working in FreeBSD.
> As you apparently already have it working, I hope, perhaps, you can point me
> to a guide where I might be able to overcome the problems I'm having.

Hmm, I could imagine 2 possible errors for this

1) You didn't install python. That's quite unlikely.

2) You haven't set CFLAGS accordingly. Call configure like this:

CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib" ./configure

And keep in mind that you will need a lot of python-packages, e.g.
py25-gnome-desktop. Don't give up, you'll really get there. And as soon as all bugs are resolved, I will gladly create a port for awn :o)
Oh one more thing: After the final "gmake install",
edit /usr/local/bin/awn-manager and change the path to python to
#!/usr/local/bin/python as otherwise preferences won't work. Good look with awn. If you need any more assistance, I'll gladly help when I can.

Hi Mark

I saw from this bug report that you have been able to get avant-window-navigator (AWN) working well on FreeBSD.

I have a reasonable experience with various linux distros and AWN and have just recently decided to try my hand at FreeBSD. I started with FBSD 6.3 as a VM, then moved to FBSD 6.3 natively installed and have now upgraded this to FBSD 7.0

While compiz-fusion works well on FBSD, I just cannot get AWN to build despite trying the patch submitted by moonbeam.

What I did was:

1. Downloaded awn-0.2.6.tar.gz from here.

2. Untarred on my Desktop and opened resulting folder avant-window-navigator-0.2.6

3. Saved the patch as "remove_xutils-trunk.patch" to the same folder.


4. Applied the patch using this command :
patch -p0 < remove_xutils-trunk.patch

5. Then tried to configure using ./configure