I've been using Devilspie for quite some time, and detailed steps on compiling rev 0.10 to run on Solaris 10. Well, I'm now using a OpenSolaris/Nevada Sunray server on x86, so I can no longer use my old binary.

Devilspie has had a complete overhaul since I last built it, so my old instructions don't quite apply anymore. What's more, Nevada has a little bug that will trip up compiling devilspie without a little bit of work.

This post will detail how to compile Devilspie 0.22 on OpenSolaris/Nevada.

  1. Download the source code tarball - devilspie-0.22.tar.gz - and extract it to a directory of your choice.
  2. Unfortunately, there is an outstanding bug on Nevada in that there is no x11.pc file required for pkg-config. We can resolve this by creating one of our own.

    Create a file called x11.pc and place the following into it:

    prefix=/usr/openwin
exec_prefix=${prefix}
libdir=${exec_prefix}/lib
includedir=${prefix}/include
xthreadlib=

Name: X11
Description: X Library
Version: 0.0
Requires: xproto kbproto inputproto
Requires.private: xau xdmcp
Cflags: -I${includedir} -D_REENTRANT -D_POSIX_PTHREAD_SEMANTICS -DXTHREADS -DXUSE_MTSAFE_API
Libs: -L${libdir} -R${libdir} -lX11
Libs.private:

    If you have root access, place this file into the /usr/lib/pkgconfig directory.
    If you don't have root access, place this anywhere you like. It's only needed temporarily, so I've placed it into the devilspie-0.22 directory.

  3. Now, for some reason, pkg-config doesn't seem to pickup the libwnck-1.0.pc file that exists in /usr/lib/pkgconfig. It expects to find libwnck.pc, so lets help it out.

    If you have root access, symlink /usr/lib/pkgconfig/libwnck-1.0.pc to /usr/lib/pkgconfig/libwnck.pc

    If you don't have root access, symlink /usr/lib/pkgconfig/libwnck-1.0.pc to libwnck.pc in the same directory you copied the x11.pc file to.

  4. If you do not have root access, or have placed the two .pc files into a non-standard location, export the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable pointing to the location of these two files.
  5. Configure Devilspie, but include the X11 libs as follows:
    $ LIBS=-lX11 ./configure

    If you forget the LIBS part, make fails with the following error:

    gcc -Wall -Wmissing-prototypes -g -O2   -o devilspie devilspie.o xutils.o  e-sexp.o
parser.o logical.o  matchers.o actions.o -lwnck-1 -lgtk-x11-2.0
-lstartup-notification-1 -lgdk-x11-2.0 -latk-1.0 -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lm -lmlib
-lpangocairo-1.0 -lpango-1.0 -lcairo -lgobject-2.0 -lgmodule-2.0 -lglib-2.0
Undefined                       first referenced
 symbol                             in file
XMoveResizeWindow                   actions.o  (symbol belongs to implicit dependency
 /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4)
XGetWindowAttributes                xutils.o  (symbol belongs to implicit dependency
 /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4)
XFree                               xutils.o  (symbol belongs to implicit dependency
 /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4)
XSync                               xutils.o  (symbol belongs to implicit dependency
 /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4)
XGetAtomName                        xutils.o  (symbol belongs to implicit dependency
 /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4)
XSendEvent                          xutils.o  (symbol belongs to implicit dependency
 /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4)
XGetWindowProperty                  xutils.o  (symbol belongs to implicit dependency
 /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4)
XChangeProperty                     actions.o  (symbol belongs to implicit dependency
 /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4)
XMoveWindow                         actions.o  (symbol belongs to implicit dependency
 /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4)
XInternAtom                         xutils.o  (symbol belongs to implicit dependency
 /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4)
XParseGeometry                      actions.o  (symbol belongs to implicit dependency
 /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4)
ld: fatal: Symbol referencing errors. No output written to devilspie
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
*** Error code 1
make: Fatal error: Command failed for target `devilspie'
  6. If all goes well, you should now be able to run make install to install Devilspie.

Remember, if you've used a version prior to 0.13, you will need to recreate your configuration file. The old xml configuration file format has been replaced with the much simpler s-expressions style.

You can find some very good documentation and examples here.