Sawfish Pager

[gearjunkie]

I found a desktop pager for sawfish that I would really like to use, but I can't get it to install correctly.

The site for the pager is http://dapfy.bei.t-online.de/sawfish/pager/

I have downloaded the tarball and successfully unzipped and untarred it, but when I try to run the gmake private-install command, I get the following output:

[nathan@localhost pager-0.6]$ gmake private-install
cc -DUSE_SAWFISH_LIBCLIENT -DFRAMEOVER `gtk-config --cflags` -DPRE_SAWFISH1_2 -Wl,-rpath `rep-config --execdir`/sawfish `rep-config --execdir`/sawfish/client.so `gtk-config --libs` pager.c -o pager
/bin/sh: line 1: rep-config: command not found
/bin/sh: line 1: rep-config: command not found
cc: /sawfish: No such file or directory
cc: /sawfish/client.so: No such file or directory
gmake: *** [pager] Error 1

if anyone has any ideas, or has gotten this to work, I'd really like to know. I'm digging sawfish right now, but this is definitely a 'must-have' feature when I'm using multiple desktops.

Thanks!
-Nathan

[AdaHacker]

Hmm.... The rep-config script is required to get information on the librep installation, much like the gtk-config script. You must have librep installed, because you can't run Sawfish without it, so I'm wondering if your distribution has a development package for librep that includes the header files and rep-config script. I'd check your install CDs for a package like that. In Slackware, it all comes as one package, but your distro may differ.

Incidentally, let me know if you get the pager to work. I've been using version 0.3 for a couple of months now and it works fine. However, something broke when I tried 0.5a and 0.6. They both compiled fine, but they didn't work properly. All I got was a blank, unresponsive window and a terminal window full of error messages from the GTK+ libraries. However, 0.3 still owrks perfectly for me, so it's not a big deal.

Edit:
Correction: the 0.6 version does work for me, but not until I go into the configuration menu and change the number of workspaces per colum and apply the changes. If I change it right back to 1, it still works, but I have to do it again every time I restart the pager. Very weird. I'd try to code around this particular bug, but I don't know Lisp.

[gearjunkie]

thanks for the advice, I found the culprit missing library and installed it, and I got the pager to install.
It works, and I got it added to my .sawfishrc file, but I have an interesting problem with the configuration menu.... well, the best wasy would be to just look at it.

-nathan

[AdaHacker]

Sigh...I probably should have mentioned that, but I didn't think of it at the time. There is a problem with newer versions of Sawfish where they are unable to extract strings from compiled Lisp programs. This is a known bug.

The fix is simple. Go into your ~/.sawfish/lisp/sawfish/wm/ext directory and delete the pager.jlc file. Leave the pager.jl file alone. Sawfish will load compiled Lisp files (.jlc) if it finds them, but will default to the uncompiled version (.jl) otherwise. Since the uncompiled Lisp programs are just plain text files, Sawfish will have no problems extracting the strings for the configuration dialog from them. Of course, interpreting the uncompiled programs takes a little longer, but not enough that you would notice.

P.S.:
Just thought I'd stick in a plug for my current favorite desktop setup: Sawfish (http://sawmill.sourceforge.net) with the ROX desktop (http://rox.sf.net) running on top of it. I find that ROX, as a minimalist desktop, makes a great complement to Sawfish, the minimalist window manager.

[gearjunkie]

thanks for the info, it works now.

I actually saw the Rox link in your signiture, and when I get a bit of time to install it and try it out, I was definitely planning on it. It looks like a good lightweight alternative to gnome or KDE.

-nathan