Building mate-font-viewer from source

Support & Help Requests
,
1

Is there any way to build just the mate-font-viewer from source using the GitHub repo?

Since it resides in the mate-control-center, I tried to build that whole package but I’m getting a bunch of messages after running ./autogen.sh && make mentioned below:

Please add the files
  codeset.m4 gettext.m4 glibc21.m4 iconv.m4 isc-posix.m4 lcmessage.m4
  progtest.m4
from the /usr/share/aclocal directory to your autoconf macro directory
or directly to your aclocal.m4 file.
You will also need config.guess and config.sub, which you can get from
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/config/.

and

configure: error: Package requirements (gtk+-3.0 >= 3.22.0  gmodule-2.0  glib-2.0 >= 2.50.0  gthread-2.0  gio-2.0  gio-unix-2.0  libxml-2.0  mate-desktop-2.0 >= 1.21.1) were not met:

No package 'libxml-2.0' found
No package 'mate-desktop-2.0' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables CAPPLET_CFLAGS
and CAPPLET_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.
  • I installed the libxml2-dev
  • I have no idea how to go about mate-desktop-2.0, although there’s mate-desktop/mate-desktop containing libmate-desktop library that “provides API shared by several applications”; is this the one? If it is, how should I use it?

Would really appreciate it if somebody could give me a hand in this regard to a newbie like me…

Best regards,
Sakib

2

If you don’t get any response from here pls ask on the github project page.

3

At first we need to enable Source code repositories (aka deb-src) from software-properties-gtk.

Install development packages:

sudo apt-get install build-essential git

Then install all build-dependencies of mate-control-center package:

sudo apt-get build-dep mate-control-center

Then clone the repository:

cd ~/Downloads
git clone https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-control-center.git
cd mate-control-center/
./autogen.sh

The above will fail on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and even on 18.10 beta because of low version of mate-desktop-2.0:

configure: error: Package requirements (gtk+-3.0 >= 3.22.0  gmodule-2.0  glib-2.0 >= 2.50.0  gthread-2.0  gio-2.0  gio-unix-2.0  libxml-2.0  mate-desktop-2.0 >= 1.21.1) were not met:

Requested 'mate-desktop-2.0 >= 1.21.1' but version of mate-desktop-2.0 is 1.20.1

So we need to switch to the 1.20.3 version (should work on both 18.04 LTS and 18.10):

git checkout v1.20.3
make -j9
./font-viewer/mate-font-viewer

and so on.

Note: for deb-based distros you can also use apt-get source mate-control-center and then patch it.

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4

Thanks @Norbert_X for the how-to! I will try it out as soon as I’m free and report back…:slight_smile:

5

Hi @Norbert_X, it worked, thanks a lot…:slight_smile:

I do have one problem though- I’ve just noticed that the application that I have built from source has replaced the original pre-installed application on the system; is there anyway to isolate the built-application from the system application?:confused:

And I keep getting the following message as I mentioned in my question, even though everything runs and builds just fine:

Please add the files
  codeset.m4 gettext.m4 glibc21.m4 iconv.m4 isc-posix.m4 lcmessage.m4
  progtest.m4
from the /usr/share/aclocal directory to your autoconf macro directory
or directly to your aclocal.m4 file.
You will also need config.guess and config.sub, which you can get from
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/config/.
1 Like
6

I do no want to follow my instruction again :slight_smile: But we can get things compiled with it. I do not remember about warnings I got (or not).

If you do not want to replace system binary - then you can skip sudo make install.
Also you can always restore system binary with

sudo apt-get install --reinstall mate-control-center

You can use self-compiled binary from its path by ./font-viewer/mate-font-viewer.

7

Reinstalling might not work, as the new package goes by default into /usr/local, which supersedes /usr.

You will need to run sudo make uninstall on your m-c-c src folder.

2 Likes