Can't believe this is happening. I just made a brandnew stage3-install and rebooted. After adding X an xorg to the USE-Flags I did : 1. emerge -N @system @world 2. emerge fluxbox Result : libX11 was installed but no xorg-server nor xorg-x11 So startfluxbox ends up in a black hole. I will send my emerge --info later(cant find my ustick)
Hello, my advice is to run emerge --deep -N @system @world emerge --deep fluxbox Tell me about your results. Anyways, you are right about fluxbox depending on xorg-X11. But please consider that all the X protocols/libraries/applications emerged as fluxbox dependencies are also independent of either xorg-x11 or xorg-server.
I'm pretty sure the lack of dependency on xorg-server is intentional; none of the other window manager ebuilds have it. I agree that it can be a bit surprising when you install your first window manager and can't run it on your local machine, but actually there cases where a window manager is useful without Xorg server being installed on the same host! For instance, you can use ssh forwarding to run applications installed on a server. The server might not even have video, but your client computer does so that is where the X server is installed. (This is not just hypothetical, I have done this myself: X apps but no X server on gentoo installed on a xen virtual machine) You can also do something similar with remote desktop protocols like VNC, where the server does not need video display but the clients do have displays.
I'm wondering what would be a good place to document this issue, since most people new to gentoo would have the same expectation. It would be nice to have an overview of going from the base system to a desktop system, which could be referred to in the "Where to go from here" section of handbook; the current desktop resources are all useful but specific to various pieces of the desktop. This user happened to be using fluxbox, but the same question would come up for openbox, windowmaker, whatever... If docs team is still overloaded and doesn't have time to tackle such a document, maybe we should request a volunteer from gentoo-dev list?
Fixed in CVS. What I did was add a brief reference to the Xorg Config guide, the same as we have in our other desktop documentation. It urges the user to first setup a working X environment before beginning the Fluxbox installation. That's the best we can do on the GDP's end. If there are ebuild/dependency problems, those need to be filed with the ebuild maintainers.
