11. Installation

In it's original non-packaged form, NsCDE release or gut clone directory result is in unconfigured source form. NsCDE uses autoconf and automake to preprocess it's scripts, programs and configurations, and compile 3 helper binaries. Dependencies are checked during ./configure phase, but errors are only produced if something needed for final product is missing. That is, it is assumed that this will be built on some build machines which doesn't have installed all runtime dependencies of the NsCDE.

Much fine grained control over what is needed in build time, and what in run time is acomplished when NsCDE is packaged as RPM, DEB or Arch package. Fully functional example RPM spec, Debian DEB control and Arch PKGBUILD files are provided in pkg of the NsCDE source distribution. Thanks to the "-tb" feature of RPM, RPM package can be built straight from tarball as rpmbuild -tb NsCDE-2.X.tar.gz.

A generic installation instruction should look familiar:


  $ su - || sudo -i
  # umask 0022
  # cd /tmp
  # wget https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE/archive/NsCDE-<version>.tar.gz
  # tar xpzf NsCDE-<version>.tar.gz
  # cd NsCDE-<version>
  # ./configure
  # make
  # make install

Example above will install NsCDE into /usr/local. However, it is possible to install to some other place. For example, this will install NsCDE in /opt/sfw, but put XDG menu file in /etc/xdg/menus.


  # ./configure --prefix=/opt/sfw --sysconfdir=/etc
  # make
  # make install

For a latest master tree from development page on Github, NsCDE can be fetched with git(1) and upgraded with fetching changes in the master or some other branch. An example of this would be:


  # git clone https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE.git
  # cd NsCDE
  # ./configure
  # make
  # make install

Upgrades, either from tarball or from git, once new version is downloaded can be made by uninstalling and installing NsCDE with make(1) tool. Example of upgrade:


  # cd NsCDE
  # make uninstall
  # git fetch
  # git reset --hard @{u}
  # ./configure --sysconfdir=/etc
  # make
  # make install

Running only make uninstall will uninstall NsCDE.