I just installed OpenCDE1 on Gentoo.

http://i.imgur.com/rLDfah.png

It’s not hard to install1. It requires wxMotif and OpenMotif. On Gentoo, there already is an OpenMotif package, so wxMotif is the only package I needed to install manually. I downloaded the wxMotif 2.8.11 (you can download wxWidgets to compile of course, but you only need the Motif port)

$ ./configure --with-motif
$ gmake
$ sudo gmake install
$ sudo ldconfig

Then I compiled the OpenCDE 0.2.6.

$ cd opencde/src
$ gmake
$ cd ..
$ sudo cp -r bin etc share /usr/local/

For configuration of X, it depends on how you start your X. Basically, just replace exec your_current_wm_de with exec opencde in ~/.xinitrc, it should do the job if you already has that line.

In the screenshot above, I have conky, xcompmgr, firefox, and urxvtc + tmux running. You can run stuff you used to run. Also, I used xrandr to enable my external screen, it looked working. Well, sort of. When I dragged a window over the second screen, the left edge of a window will not be allowed to cross. So that is as far as a window can go.

The memory usage is not so light, dtpanel used 13 MB. That’s twice as Fluxbox needs. I don’t know if it’s possible to not use dtpanel. dtwm and mwm use about 6.1 MB.

But I think those are not something would stop you using OpenCDE, the documentation is. I found no documentation. I had no idea how to configure it, there are some files in ~/.opencde, so I have put urxvt in menu. The syntax is not hard to understand. But the rest of OpenCDE, I have no idea what or how I can do.

Note

According to the first comment by Woomia and the documentation1, wxMotif is no longer needed. I didn’t try the new version 0.4.2 or 0.4.3, just want to make sure you get the new information before you read this post. (2011-02-11)

[1](1, 2, 3) http://devio.us/~kpedersen/, http://devio.us/~kpedersen/documentation.php, and http://devio.us/~kpedersen/documentation.php are gone.