Saturday, July 20, 2013

Building PCManFM and LibFM from source to fix the network browsing bug in 1.1.0

One of the things I like about LXDE and Lubuntu is the PCManFM file manager. One of the few features it lacked was integrated file search. That's now build into version 1.1.0, which is installed by default in Lubuntu 13.04 and available as an update in 12.10.

However, this version also introduces a bug that breaks network browsing, and you won't be able to browse Samba shares on your network. I've read the fix is scheduled for the 1.1.1 release, but in this case it's very straightforward to compile the necessary files yourself from source, thanks to the clear instructions on the LXDE wiki.

One additional dependency that's not listed in the wiki is gtk-doc-tools, which the autogen.sh scripts will keep halting on. It's possible that it would have been installed as a recommended dependency by another package, but I usually use "apt-get install" with "--no-install-recommends" to prevent installing extra packages.

In compiling for Lubuntu 13.04, one of the package dependencies is also slightly different, you have to substitute libmenu-cache-dev for libmenu-cache1-dev from the wiki instructions.