installing 3.9b1 wmii window manager on FreeBSD
Posted by superuser
Please NOTE that now the port x11-wm/wmii-devel is updated on vers.3.9b1 , so what it follows is not needed !!!# cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/wmii-devel && make install clean
Yesterday i spent a lot of hours to experiment with wmii window manager in FreeBSD. wmii is a small, dynamic window manager for X11. Offers tiling and classic modes to manage X11 windows, is higlhy scriptable and very well documented.
In FreeBSD ports collection, at the time of this writing, there are available two ports for wmii, the x11-wm/wmii and the newer x11-wm/wmii-devel. x11-wm/wmii port points to the latest stable version of 3..6, but it's reported as deprecated in the official website . On the other side x11-wm/wmii-devel targets to the s20090703 snapshot. In my case i wanted to install the latest recommended (beta) wmii 3.9b1. I have to say that FreeBSD port collection is one of the best packaging system and is updating in a fast and secure way by the ports engineers, but wmii is not the top famous window manager, so it's perfectly normal to not see a beta release here.
I'm not an expert FreeBSD porter but i made small changes on the Makefile of x11-wm/wmii-devel port to update at the latested 3.9b1 and it seems to work fine. You can download here my patch.
Take note that i considered the guidelines from this post, so i removed the dmenu and 9base dependencies of v.3.6 from the Makefile.
Tip for newbies: After applying the changes on wmii-devel's Makefile, do the following
# cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/wmii-devel # make makesum
to automatically generate the updated distinfo file of the port, and make install clean as usually
