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Xfce development source code

If you want to build Xfce from source code, you can either download the source tarballs of a released version of Xfce from our download page, or try a development version, by downloading it from subversion (only for the adventurous). Please note that installing two different versions of Xfce (ie. stable and development) is not supported.

Latest release version (4.6.x)

This version contain the latest bug fixes, without any major new feature. This should be more stable than the development version (and even than the last official release), but there is still no guarantee that this version is bug free.

Latest development version (4.7.x)

This version contain the latest development updates and bug fixes. There is no guarantee that it's fully working and bug free.

Getting the source code

To get a list of available modules and components, you can browse the GIT repositories.

Latest release version (4.6.x) from the GIT repositories

You can download the desired modules with the following command:

git clone -b xfce-4.6 git://git.xfce.org/category/$modulename

For example:

git clone -b xfce-4.6 git://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel

Latest development version (4.7.x) from the GIT repositories

You can download the desired modules with the following command:

git clone git://git.xfce.org/category/$modulename

For example:

git clone git://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel

To synchronize your local copy (checkout) of the release or development tree with the one on the server you can run git pull instead of git clone. This will speed up the process and minimize the Xfce server transfer.

Building the modules

If you have downloaded the tarballs, you need to unpack them before going on.

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 libraries, which is ${prefix}/lib/pkgconfig. For example:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

To build the modules from the tarballs just run:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local && make && make install

To build the Xfce modules from GIT (you need the xfce4-dev-tools package) run this command:

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local && make && make install

The requirements page lists all the required dependencies and the build order of the modules.