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I want to install the stable release of xfce 4.12 on my Xubuntu 14.04.2. However, when I add the repository (ppa:xubuntu-dev/xfce-4.12) via terminal I get a message about these being pre-releases and to wait for the final release date... Yet, the final release is already up (xfce website, two months ago).

  1. Why do I get a warning message if the stable version was released already? That is slightly misleading.

    Furthermore, all posts and info I see about installing xfce 4.12, either old (pre-release, this or this) or new (post release,this) follow the same proceedure (add dev-ppa).

  2. How should I properly install a stable release if it doesn't appear on the main repos?

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2 Answers2

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When you run this command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/xfce-4.12

and this message appears:

Xfce 4.12 packages for currently supported versions of Xubuntu. Please note that these are pre-release versions, which may contain annoying bugs and/or crash.

Then it's just a warning. There is the potential possibility that this PPA can also supply unstable versions.

But you can compile the stable version.

Here are the instructions to compile from source, e.g. for xfce-4.12:

wget http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.12/fat_tarballs/xfce-4.12.tar.bz2
tar xf xfce-4.12.tar.bz2
cd src
for f in *.tar.bz2; do tar xf $f; done

Then in each folder, e.g. Thunar-1.6.6

cd Thunar-1.6.6
./configure
make

and install with:

make install

or with checkinstall for .deb packages:

sudo apt-get install checkinstall
sudo checkinstall
A.B.
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  • How can it be possible that "stable" aka best versions of a package has to be installed in such a long way whereas "unstable" aka incomplete-buggy versions can be installed from the terminal in just a few simple steps? –  Apr 22 '15 at 10:03
  • @luchonacho You have to ask the developers. :) – A.B. Apr 22 '15 at 10:04
  • If you compile it from source and dont want to cd, configure, make manually, you can execute this : (dir=pwd; find . -type d -maxdepth 1 | while read folder; do cd "$dir/$folder"; pwd; ./configure; make; sudo make install; done; ) 2>&1 | tee /tmp/log. this will iterator over all folder, cd, configure, make then sudo make install and output logs to /tmp/log. – Lynch Aug 29 '16 at 00:26
  • then grep -niH 'not found' /tmp/log can help to find missing deps. – Lynch Aug 29 '16 at 00:42
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Ok, got the answer for my first question. I added the repo and looked at its content in synaptic. What you see there is a bunch of packages. Some I have installed (since I have xfce 4.10). For those, some are up-to-date but others have a newer release. The key is then to contrast the version of those newer packages with the stable release. And, voila, for many they differ! This is, some packages have a newer release, beyond the stable one, which makes perfect sense. The dev ppa gives you access to the newest versions of packages, not to the stable ones. The central issue here then is that xubuntu-dev do not provide another ppa with only the newest and stable versions.

All these means that you cannot install the stable version of a meta-package (xfce) from the dev-ppa! Which implies that this,this,this, and part of this posts are wrong (for the latter I invite A.B to write the correct answer).

Thus, I will delete the ppa and compile the stable release as A.B. showed in another answer.

(Nice to learn something new about linux/ubuntu!)

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