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forcedtopicksomething

Member

Registered: 2023-07-26

Posts: 74

Cannot build xfce4-panel on Debian 13 because of wrong version?

Debian 13, thus Xfce 4.20.1.

I have the taskbar in the bottom and the "Show Desktop" button/plugin in the bottom-right. It must be like that. Sadly, every day about 100 times the mouse cursor naturally ends up in the bottom-right corner of the screen, meaning it hovers the "Show Desktop" thing, which causes it to bring up an obnoxious "tooltip" which covers a very important part of the screen.

I need to hide that tooltip somehow.

The plugin's settings of course have no way to turn this off, and Xfce has no way to turn its UI tooltips off entirely without also messing up other programs and causing other problems.

It's impossible to get hold of the Xfce developers.

The only solution I can think of is to change the source code of that "Show Desktop" plugin and build my own personal copy. I have hunted down its source here: https://github.com/xfce-mirror/xfce4-pa … top.c#L326

I cloned the repo locally, went to that file and uncommented the line. Then I went to the root of the project dir and typed `meson build`, since it has that "meson.build" file and obviously uses Meson.

Meson not installed, so I did `sudo apt install meson` and repeated.
No cmake installed, so I did `sudo apt install cmake` and repeated.
No libgarcon-1-dev installed, so I did `sudo apt install libgarcon-1-dev` and repeated.
No libgarcon-gtk3-1-dev installed, so I did `sudo apt install libgarcon-gtk3-1-dev` and repeated.
But now I got completely stuck with an impossible error:

Dependency libxfce4ui-2 found: NO. Found 4.20.1 but need: '>= 4.21.3'
Found CMake: /usr/bin/cmake (3.31.6)
Run-time dependency libxfce4ui-2 found: NO (tried cmake)

meson.build:47:13: ERROR: Dependency lookup for libxfce4ui-2 with method 'pkgconfig' failed: Invalid version, need 'libxfce4ui-2' ['>= 4.21.3'] found '4.20.1'.

To be clear, I have it all installed:

`apt search libxfce4ui-2`:

gir1.2-libxfce4ui-2.0/stable,now 4.20.1-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  Typelib file for libxfce4ui

libxfce4ui-2-0/stable,now 4.20.1-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  widget library for Xfce - Gtk+3 variant

libxfce4ui-2-dev/stable,now 4.20.1-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  Development files for libxfce4ui - Gtk+3 variant

libxfce4ui-utils/stable,now 4.20.1-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
  Utility files for libxfce4ui

... but for some reason it demands a version that doesn't exist on Debian 13.

All I want is to turn that damn .c file into a libshowdesktop.so so I can move it to replace the current /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xfce4/panel/plugins/libshowdesktop.so file so I don't have to get constantly annoyed by the the stupid tooltip. Why does it demand a version that doesn't exist? What do I do now?

I had a gut feeling that it would be a nightmare getting this thing to build. This kind of "broken dependency" hell always happens whenever I have ever tried to fix something in open source; they never let me build the damn thing.

PS: Every single time I log in to this forum, it tells me: "Data are sent too quickly. You robot " before it lets me in...

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,383

Re: Cannot build xfce4-panel on Debian 13 because of wrong version?

Dependency libxfce4ui-2 found: NO. Found 4.20.1 but need: '>= 4.21.3'

It does find it but its not recent enough. You probably cloned git master which is pretty far ahead of the version packaged in debian 13 (including updated libraries like libxfce4ui).

If you want to do this, you should get the debian source for xfce4-panel and patch and rebuild that. Here is a post that looks like it walks you through the process.

PS: Every single time I log in to this forum, it tells me: "Data are sent too quickly. You robot wink" before it lets me in...

Are you on a fast connection?

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forcedtopicksomething

Member

Registered: 2023-07-26

Posts: 74

Re: Cannot build xfce4-panel on Debian 13 because of wrong version?

Here

Thank you. It took a lot of sweat, confusion and cursing even with the (minimal) instructions on that URL, but I finally did manage to get it to work due to it. Finally the horrible tooltips are gone! I just wish I wouldn't have to go through these trials to hide such a major annoyance...

When I did `apt-get source xfce4-panel`, it fetched xfce4-panel-4.20.4 even though I have 4.20.1 installed, which I feared would cause it to not work, or perhaps become crashy, but so far it seems to not matter. Now I have to carefully write these notes down for the next time it replaces my custom libshowdesktop.so with the default one, so I can repeat the process.

One of the many obstacles involved installing countless new packages on my system just for this, which now makes me feel like I've made a big mess. But it's better than having to see the tooltip many times a day...

I don't feel nearly brave enough (nor do I have the energy) to attempt the same thing for Thunar and its annoying Side Pane tooltips, though!

Are you on a fast connection?

I wouldn't say that I have a "fast connection" anymore in this day and age, but why would that matter? It seems to expect the user to wait for a few full seconds before entering the username/password, which of course I have saved and don't input manually every time.

forcedtopicksomething

Member

Registered: 2023-07-26

Posts: 74

Re: Cannot build xfce4-panel on Debian 13 because of wrong version?

When I did `apt-get source xfce4-panel`, it fetched xfce4-panel-4.20.4 even though I have 4.20.1 installed

This was a mistake by me. I saw "xfce4/stable,now 4.20.1" and assumed that xfce4-panel was the same version, but it was actually the same version (well, "xfce4-panel/stable,now 4.20.4-1" -- not 100% sure what the last -1 is about)...

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,383

Re: Cannot build xfce4-panel on Debian 13 because of wrong version?

I believe the last number is the debian revision number.

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