FVWM-Crystal

Stable releases

You can find new releases of FVWM-Crystal at sourceforge. Old releases can be find in the download area of the old repository. 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

Fvwm-Crystal current development is using git at github.com/fvwm-crystal.

Old development code can be browsed at fvwm-crystal.svn.sourceforge.net.

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

git clone https://github.com/fvwm-crystal/fvwm-crystal.git

This will create the directory fvwm-crystal/ on your disk with the git 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:

git pull

git 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 get in touch with FVWM-Crystal development, make bug repports, suggestions or whatever, see: FVWM-Crystal on github

Requirements