Xfce4 panel on DFB

Why?
The idea of having a directfb-based desktop involve having quite a lot of apps available. This can be apps like an internet browser or a file manager. But often, Desktop use apps like panels in order to launche these apps. Since AFAIK no such panel was available for directfb, in decided to try to port one of them, to see if can work. I choose the xfce4-panel because i'm an xfce-user, and it's the one I know the best. Also, the biggest dependency is the gtk library, wich was already ported to directfb.

Here is the result:

How to build
Before you can compile the xfce4-panel, you will need some other stuff. First of all, install Directfb. Note that you will need to enable the multi-application in directfb, or all your apps will be in different screen. (This implies you to install fusion) After that, you must install gtk and choose directfb as the gdk backend (have a look at this: Projects:GTK_on_DirectFB) Then you can begin with the installation of xfce4-panel. First, you will need a modofied version of the xfce4-dev-tools package. This modified version is available in the downloads section, lower on this page. You can install it by doing a simple ./configure --prefix=$YOUR_PREFIX && make && make install. Then you will need a version of libxfce4util. The one available here is issue from the main xfce branch, without any modofcation. This is a quite old version, but it's know to work. Perhaps more recent versions can work too, but I didn't test it yet. After libxfce4util, you must install libxfcegui4. For that, you will need the modified version from here, some this lib does contain some code wich is X11 dependend (unlike libxfce4util). Once you've downloaded the archive, untar it and do a ./configure && make && make install, and all must go well. (Take care anyway if you have X11 installed on your system that you are compiling it with the right backend). And finally, you can go with xfce4-panel itself. The install process is the same as above. And now, well, you must be able to launch the panel by typing xfce4-panel from the command line. Take care anyway that that al with not be working. For exemple, the taskmanager won't display any apps, and some panel plugins won't work. But if all you want is something to lanch application, then you have. Enjoy!

Downloads
Files are available from the directfb cvs repository:

libxfce4util:

libxfcegui4:

xfce4-dev-tools:

xfce4-panel: