Installing Xfce4
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## Installing Xfce4

### Binary packages

The Xfce 4 project officially only releases source code for the desktop environment. However, binary packages may have been contributed by other people for your OS or distribution.

Look at the Xfce site for download locations and additional information about available binary packages. If you could not find binary packages for your OS, they may be available from your OS vendor or distributor, or you can install Xfce 4 from source.

### Graphical installers

The easiest way to install Xfce from source is by using the graphical installers. Documentation and instructions are available.

### Building from source

To compile Xfce manually, look at the Xfce site for download locations.

Building the packages should be a simple matter of unpacking the tarballs and, from the top source directory, typing:

    ./configure && make && make install

Some package will have extra configure options available. You can find them by typing ./configure `--help`.

Xfce 4 depends on pkg-config, GTK+ >= 2.2, libxml2 and, for xffm, on libdbh, which is available from SourceForge. If you installed these from a binary package, make sure you have the corresponding `-dev` packages installed as well.

Optionally you can install librsvg >= 2.2, for SVG icon support, and libstartup-notification, to have a busy cursor when loading applications that support this standard.

If you install into a different prefix from pkg-config, you have to set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH variable to include the path to the *.pc files installed by the Xfce 4 libraries, which is ${prefix}/lib/pkgconfig. For example:

    export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

All source tarballs also contain a so called spec file that allows you to build your own rpm's:

    rpmbuild -ta module-x.y.z.tar.gz

### Using CVS

The latest development sources for Xfce 4 are available from CVS.

Look here for information on how to obtain the latest development updates from CVS. You can also use the WebCVS link to browse the CVS tree.

### Additional software

The Xfce Goodies project collects third-party contributions for Xfce 4. There are some excellent panel plugins available that greatly enhance the functionality of Xfce 4.

Xfmedia is a lightweight media player for Xfce, based on the xine engine. It is the perfect media player for the perfect desktop environment.

Terminal is an advanced, but easy to use terminal emulator for the Xfce Desktop Environment. It contains all feature you would expect from a modern terminal emulator.

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