To compile adesklets from source, you will need:
It can also use, if present in the system:
This package was built with portability in mind: all vendor-specific extensions were avoided, and specs (ANSI, SVID 3, BSD 4.3, POSIX) were followed in a conservative way. Nevertheless, original development took place on a single Linux system; it is quite probable that adesklets will not compile or work as expected in some cases. Fixing portability issues is an important concern for us.
adesklets is been ported and successfully tested by the developpers on many systems. As of version 0.4.8, it has been verified to compile and run out of the box on:
Update: adesklets >=0.4.8 has also been reported a user to work on FreeBSD 5.3, but the author did not have a chance to verify this. Now that adesklets is in debian unstable, it seems to at least compile on all available kernels and architectures: go see http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/adesklets.
Did you try to run the package on something not listed here? Let us know, especially if it did not work.
The current version of the software (as a source bzip'ed tarball) can be found on the SourceForge project page: http://sf.net/projects/adesklets/
You can extract it from the console with tar. As of version 0.4.8, the command line would be:
tar xvjf adesklets-0.4.8.tar.bz2
or, if your installed version of tar does not support filtering archives through bzip2:
bzcat adesklets-0.4.8.tar.bz2 | tar xv
As of adesklets 0.4.8, you can also download from SourceForge an ascii-armored detached signature named adesklets-0.4.8.tar.bz2.asc, that you can match against the author's Open PGP public key (see Open PGP Public Key, in appendix) to assert the package integrity. For instance, with GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org/), you would use:
gpg --verify adesklets-0.4.8.tar.bz2.asc adesklets-0.4.8.tar.bz2
You can also get the public key for syfou@users.sourceforge.net from various public key servers such as http://www.keyserver.net/ or http://pgp.mit.edu/. Feel free to contact the author directly if you want to authenticate the key further.
adesklets provides the usual autoconf/automake scripts of GNU packages.
Therefore, in most cases, installation follows the normal three steps:
Running `configure' takes awhile. While running, it prints some messages describing which features it is checking for.
You can remove the program binaries and object files from the source code directory by typing `make clean'. To also remove the files that `configure' created (so you can compile the package for a different kind of computer), type `make distclean'.
Some systems require unusual options for compilation or linking that the `configure' script does not know about. You can give `configure' initial values for variables by setting them in the environment. Using a Bourne-compatible shell, you can do that on the command line like this:
CC=c89 CFLAGS=-O2 LIBS=-lposix ./configure
Or on systems that have the `env' program, you can do it like this:
env CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include LDFLAGS=-s ./configure
adesklets comes with a few optional features you can select or not from the `configure' script. Type:
./configure --help
for a complete, short description. Here are a few interesting ones:
[1] Except for headless builds, useful for server environments and such; read further for details.