Installing CDE

Common Desktop Environment isn't too difficult to install, it just has to be installed about three times to get it right. The things you have to do, in this order, are:

- Install Dependencies

- Keep RPCBind Happy

- Compile

- Check

- Reinstall and repeat until it works fully

Installing The Dependencies

Now, there are a lot of things that CDE needs to work. I don't really care about any other system other than Debian/Ubuntu, so for now, I'll just list the one command needed to install the not-included dependencies:

Got that? got that installed? OK. Now, you are going to want to configure locale-gen with sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales. You are going to want to generate de_DE, es_ES, fr_FR, and it_IT, in both UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 varieties. While you are there, you may want to run that a couple of times to make sure that it took.

Keeping RPCBind Happy

Allright, so now you have all of the Dependencies. But there's one in particular that's is a bit off: RPCBind. Vitally important to the well-being of your CDE, it needs to start in insecure mode or CDE will not start at all. So first, you are going to want to edit a file called /etc/rc.local. With your preferred Text Editor, edit it and add in the following:

#!/bin/bash 
 rpcbind -i -w
exit 0

This is the script that runs right before the system moves from 'boot' into 'regular use', and you can put whatever you need in there. Now, this starts after the intended method of starting RPCBind runs, so you will have to get rid of that with:

Now, hopefully, RPCBind will happilly accept CDE's systems.

Compiling

Now we get to the main event (and by that I mean it will be the main waste of time): Compiling. We start by cloning the git repo:

and cd into it:

and now we begin the major waste of time. grab a short movie (about an hour) and run this command:

And get some popcorn. Keep an eye on it like it's a pot of soup - It may flash errors, and some may be harmful. No way to tell until we check. However, once it's done compiling it all, we need to cd to another directory, and run a script in it, like so:

cd admin/IntegTools/dbTools
sudo ./installCDE -s ../../..

and watch very closely. these errors here - Missing files for languages, mostly - are the main cause of CDE fuck-ups. When the command finishes, do nothing (wait to check on the check step), move to a different directory, and run another script, like so:

cd ../post_install/linux
sudo ./configRun -e

Running and Checking

Now we need to do some final checks before running. First, you will have to make sure the system knows where everything is. Add :/usr/dt/bin to the end of whatever your system uses for setting the $PATH variable (It could be your personal .bashrc, /etc/environment, or /etc/X11/wdm/wdm-config, depending on what your system uses.) Restart your system somehow, and run this command to get an X session with CDE In it, in a basic console (WITHOUT another X server running):

Congrats. You finally got to a Graphical User Session. Now, there are some problems that are more likely than not to occur on your first install:

- You have a blue screen for minutes on end, before a screen pops up saying something along the lines of "ttsession could not be started" and telling you to look in /etc/hosts.

This means that RPCBind is not starting in 'insecure' mode, or not starting at all. You'll have to make sure that it's both running and running 'insecurely'.

- Your front panel (the thing at the bottom) is in shades of grey. Opening a Dtterm (CDE's Terminal Application) sees mostly boxes instead of characters.

This is much more severe. CDE has somehow not been compiled with full language support. Make sure that locale-gen has all the languages specified, and re-clone, recompile and restart.

After a couple of re-installs (Or, if you are lucky, on the first install), it should work and have the colours that the pixture in the index (minus the background). In this case, you may now want to tweak it a bit.