Compiling problem on Linux 6.14.0-37-generic

[beechwood13]

---

/usr/include/rpc/types.h:240:10: fatal error: netconfig.h: No such file or directory
240 | #include <netconfig.h>
| ^~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.

[olvwm]

Hello @beechwood13,

As I mentioned in the previous issue #1 that you filed, building this on newer Linux distros seems to run into a bunch of
problems and the workaround is to use an older distro to build and use the resulting binaries.
Can you clarify which distro you are using and list the exact build steps.

BTW, as I explained in the README I'm doing this for my own
use of olvwm and I can build and use it successfully (by building it on older distros). If I need to work on your issues,
my time is not "free", even if the code itself is "free".

So lets start with the question that is bothering me the most: Why do you need this software?
As I point out in my longer explanation, there are a zillion other
window managers so if you are not as obsessed with it as I am, you should be able to just pack up and move to something
from at least this century.

[beechwood13]

Hi,

First of all, thanks for answering my error reports and taking time for developing this software. I appriciate your efforts very much!

To your question: WHY I NEED THIS SOFTWARE?

I am so old that in my young years I did different sequence analysis and sequence manipulation tasks using different programs of the GCG package on SUN workstations.
So, I am familiar with xview and olvwm. But it's not some nostalgic feeling why I am pursuing for a working olvwm system. The GCG package had a nice graphical sequence editor called Genetic Data Environment (GDE). In the later versions of GCG (or its successors?) GDE was renamed the SeqLab (if I remember well). SeqLab was not free and later it disappeared, but the free GDE was ported to Linux and also for Mac. Until recently, I could use 32bit Linux GDE as standalone program with installed 32bit xview packages (xviewg and xview-clients) in recent 64bit Linux environments quite well. The last system on which I could run 32bit GDE (and also 32bit textedit and clock, as test programs) was Linux Mint 21.3 with 5.15 kernel version about a year ago. However, after upgrading to newer Linux versions, that use the 6.8 and 6.14 kernel lines, the 32bit xview programs no longer work. My hope is, that if could establish a fully working 64bit xview/olwvm system, I could run GDE again (what I like very much).

My present system is:

Linux Mint 22.3 ("Zena"), released in January 2026, based on Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS (Noble Numbat)
Kernel: 6.14.0-37-generic

Compiling errors I fixed:

(1):

/usr/include/rpc/types.h:240:10: fatal error: netconfig.h: No such file or directory
240 | #include <netconfig.h>
| ^~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.

Symbolic link created:
/usr/include/ntirpc/netconfig.h to /usr/include/netconfig.h

(2):

usr/include/rpc/rpc.h:47:10: fatal error: rpc/xdr.h: No such file or directory
47 | #include <rpc/xdr.h> /* generic (de)serializer */

Symbolic link created:
/usr/include/ntirpc/rpc/xdr.h to /usr/include/rpc/xdr.h

After these, compiling terminated with the following errors (last 15 lines:

ndet_loop.c:844:9: warning: ignoring return value of ‘write’ declared with attribute ‘warn_unused_result’ [-Wunused-result]
844 | write( pipefds[1], "a", 1 );
| ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
make[5]: *** [Makefile:1207: ndet_loop.o] Error 1
make[5]: Leaving directory '/usr/local/xview-main/xview-3.2p1.4/lib/libxview/notify'
make[4]: *** [Makefile:1185: all] Error 1
make[4]: Leaving directory '/usr/local/xview-main/xview-3.2p1.4/lib/libxview'
make[3]: *** [Makefile:1162: all] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory '/usr/local/xview-main/xview-3.2p1.4/lib'
make[2]: *** [Makefile:1186: all] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory '/usr/local/xview-main/xview-3.2p1.4'
make[1]: *** [Makefile:1287: World] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory '/usr/local/xview-main/xview-3.2p1.4'
make: *** [Makefile:9: libs] Error 2

Furthermore, I noticed that a wrong symlink is written in /usr/local/xview-main/xview-3.2p1.4/build/include:

../../..//lib/pixrect/rasterfile.h #this is written and wrong
./../../lib/pixrect/rasterfile.h #this would be correct

Cheers
beechwood13

[olvwm]

Ah, so you don't need olvwm, just the xview libraries. Makes sense. Thanks for the clarification and apologies if I came off sounding a little rude/grumpy -- especially to a fellow old timer ;)

I've collected a bunch of other xview related repos that are on Github in case any of them have made more progress than I have - feel free to check those out as well.

I'm in the middle of interviews looking for a job so the attention I can give this may be spotty at best, currently.

A suggestion I have is to just use a 32-bit VM running an older distro. Install QEMU/KVM and then just use qemu-system-i386 -kvm -cdrom distro.iso where distro.iso is one of the older 32 bit ISO images. This way you should be able to stay independent of any changes in the future and continue to use your old code as is.

Meanwhile I'll continue to work on this as time permits. Thanks in advance for your patience.

Also BTW, thanks for your interest in this, I assumed I'd be the only remaining consumer of this software.

[olvwm]

I've been moving the build of libxview to use automake(autotools) instead of imake.
I can currently get it to build successfully on gentoo Ubuntu 16.04.
I'm in the process of porting the clients over as well to verify that nothing broke.

[olvwm]

There were a bunch of things which slowed down progress on this issue.

Obviously, it was tax season and while I was distracted with that, my kid
had a spring break and to top it all off, my wife got appendicitis and
needed a trip to the ER where they needed to do an emergency surgery to
remove her appendix (the procedure is called an appendectomy, TIL).

All of this while I was also busy attending job interviews where supposedly
"grown up" engineers quizzed me on stupid leetcode exercises, which have no
connection to the grungy real world code that people have to deal with day in
and day out. Sigh!

Anyway, coming back to real world code, despite all of those distractions
(if you want to call them that), I did manage to get the porting of libxview
to autotools done - but only on Ubuntu 16.04, for now. I'm still tied at the
hip to Ubuntu 16.04 since that is what I still use for development despite
how old it is, since that is the only version that can still boot up and run
successfully on the ancient laptop with 2GB memory that I use as my daily
driver for working on olvwm.

I did try to build the code on a relatively more recent of Gentoo Live (which
is also able to boot up on that laptop) and I can (finally!) successfully
reproduce a related issue (yay!) which I assume is a precursor to Github Issue #2
reported by @beechwood13.

[olvwm]

Hello @beechwood13,

I think that with the changes that I committed (as of yesterday), you should be able to at least build libxview
on any of the newer distros which use the newer versions of the compiler (I tested the build on a Gentoo Live
that I'd downloaded last year, but unless there have been major changes to the compilers, it should be good).

Note that the flags I used are the minimum required to just get the stuff built, so I assume that additional
work will be required to get any of the libxview clients working - I know for a fact that clock does not work yet.

I'll wait for you to confirm that you can build the newer code before closing this issue. Please file any newer
problems that you run into as separate issues.