ratpoison in 13.1

[mimosa]

I've just put ratpoison on my 13.1 xfce and I imagined the easiest way to configure it will be to download 13.37's user-settings-ratpoison and install manually.

In fact all I did is copy the .ratmenu directory from the source and put it in ~/ (I have my own version of .ratpoisonrc to hand).

However, C-t r doesn't work; when I called .ratmenu/main.sh manually, it told me:

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mimosa[.ratmenu]$ main.sh
./main.sh: line 3: ratmenu: command not found

But I can't see any sign of a package "ratmenu" in the repo: http://salix.enialis.net/i486/13.37/sou ... ist32.html

I also vaguely remember that when I've tried to do something like this before, my custom .ratpoisonrc didn't behave, and I had to start again from the default. That doesn't matter, but may be relevant. (Not tested yet because I'd need to restart ratpoison)

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[gapan]

The ratpoison package in 13.1 does not include ratmenu. The ratpoison package in 13.37 bundles ratmenu in the ratpoison package. You can either take the sources from the 13.37 package and rebuild the package in your 13.1 system, or just take the ratmenu tarball (also in the 13.37 ratmenu source dir) and install only that separately.

[mimosa]

Thanks gapan. That makes sense because I suppose ratmenu is a purely in-house convenience created for the Ratpoison edition of Salix. Sounds like the easiest way will be to just install the whole 13.37 package (using the packaged version, not source).

The reason I'm bothering now is because my main machine died, so for the time being I'm using that one (13.1) more. But I don't really want to upgrade to 13.37 when 14.0 is within sight.

[gapan]

I'm not sure the 13.37 package works in 13.1. It might. Or not. But it will certainly work if you rebuild it for 13.1.

[mimosa]

OK, I'll do it that way. Thanks again!

[mimosa]

There's only one problem - when I installed Ratpoison as a 13.1 package, it appeared as an option at the login screen (clicking on "Session"); but now I have uninstalled that package and built 13.37 ratpoison from source, it's not recognised. Presumably this is because I bypassed normal package management:

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root[mimosa]# slapt-get --search ratpoison
ratpoison-1.4.5-i486-1gv [inst=no]: ratpoison (Say good-bye to the rodent)

Is there a way round this? Clearly, I don't want to include the 13.37 repos as a source ...

Alternatively, I could configure Salix to boot into runlevel 3 and dispense with the graphical login, but I don't really want to do anything that might further discourage my wife and daughter from occasionally using Linux instead of Windows

[Tim CowChip]

Hi mimosa
I had this same problem with building Xmonad and not finding it listed as a session in gdm. Can you create /usr/share/xsession/ratpoison.desktop?

[mimosa]

Thanks Tim CowChip. That sounds like a promising approach, and the fact that it didn't work may just mean a little more tweaking is needed - in fact,I'm pretty sure it'll just be that I need to create the file xinitrc.ratpoison, available at the same place. I'll do that and try rebooting.

Here is the file I downloaded from the source repo at http://salix.enialis.net/i486/13.37/sou ... ratpoison/ :

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[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=XSession
Name=Ratpoison
Exec=/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.ratpoison

No doubt a similar approach could be devised for xmonad.

Incidentally, that's the /usr/share/xsessions directory.

EDIT No, that didn't work!

A secondary question: I also created /usr/bin/rpreboot and rpshutdown, taken from the same place. Where can I get rpallwin, for which there is apparently just a patch? I can certainly live without this though.

[gapan]

I think you're making things difficult for yourself by trying to manually add every little bit that is in the 13.37 ratpoison package. My suggestion was to get all the files in that source directory and create a package by running

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fakeroot slkbuild -X

you won't need to do any manual installation of anything if you install the package that will be created with that.

[Tim CowChip]

What gapan said. (This means that I agree and couldn't say it better or as good)

No doubt a similar approach could be devised for xmonad.

Incidentally, that's the /usr/share/xsessions directory.

sorry about the wrong directory name. I was posting from my FreeBSD install and couldn't check my facts (FreeBSD won't mount ext4 or ext3. It will mount ext2).