FVWM-Crystal

Stable releases

You can find stable releases of FVWM-Crystal in the download area. Requirements are described at the bottom of this page. Installation is pretty strightforward - unpack the package to a separate directory and run command:

make install

FVWM-Crystal will be installed in /usr/local directory by default (you need to have root privileges). If you want to change the default installation directory, you can do this by running command:

make PREFIX=/usr install

If you don't have your own ~/.Xresources, you can grab one from addons/ directory included in the package. Without it terminal windows will be unconfigured. If you use login manager, such as gdm or kdm, copy file addons/fvwm-crystal.desktop to /usr/share/xsessions - now you will be able to select "FVWM-Crystal" from the "Sessions" menu. If you prefer startx, you can grab example ~/.Xsession (or ~/.xinitrc) file from addons/ directory.

Now everything should be set up. You can now restart your X session and enjoy your new desktop :)

Development release

Crystal is developed using subversion (svn) revision control system. You can use the development release if you want to be up-to-date with newest configuration, or you want to send your changes to the maintainer. Either way, managing your changes in configuration files using svn repository is very good idea :)

You can browse online the repository at fvwm-crystal.svn.sourceforge.net.

To download FVWM-Crystal repository to current directory issue command:

svn co https://fvwm-crystal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/fvwm-crystal fvwm-crystal

This will create the directory fvwm-crystal/ on your disk with the svn repository tree. You can now install Crystal using "standard" way (see the installation procedure of the stable release for details). Another way of installing Crystal is to make a symlink from the repository to a directory in your $HOME:

ln -s fvwm-crystal/fvwm ~/.fvwm-crystal
ln -s fvwm-crystal/bin ~/bin

You can select different directory than ~/bin for binaries, it just needs to be in your $PATH variable. FVWM-Crystal automatically will recognize that it has installation files in ~/.fvwm-crystal/, even if there is system-wide installation.

Now you can use Crystal "as usual". If you want to get new updates from the main repository, cd into your local FVWM-Crystal repository and issue command:

svn up

Subversion will download new changes and apply them.

Development

If you want to make changes in the configuration files, you can make them in ~/.fvwm directory - just remember to retain the directory structure of the original config files. You don't need to copy all of them, just the ones that you want to change - Crystal will automatically use them instead of the original ones.

To add new files to the repository issue command:

svn add "filename1" "filename2" ...

Directories and their content can be added using the same way:

svn add directoryname

You can delete things the same way using the commad 'svn del ...'

If you want to review the changes that you made in the repository, run:

svn st

This will print a list with modified/added/removed files. When you want to record these changes, run:

svn ci -m "related comment"

This will commit your changes to the repository. For that to work, you need a developer account for the project. If you want to do your own local svn repository, please read the svn documentation.

Requirements