I installed RHEL10 Beta in VirtualBox. I don’t think I’m that unusual, as someone who uses RH/Rocky/Alma at work, so wants something at home to get familiar with it, but doesn’t want a full blown desktop. Therefore, I installed the minimal version, then added some things to it. As RHEL10 and therefore, I’m guessing, Rocky, won’t have X, I decided to try to install labwc, an openbox replacement for Wayland. I was about to do it, rebuilding a bunch of Fedora 40 srpms.
I didn’t keep track this time of everything I had to build and install. I also installed wmenu to do commands and the foot teminal. The srpm for wmenu gave me a 404 so I wound up just installing the F40 rpm when installed without a problem. The labwc window manager required wlroots, which required various things, so it wasn’t that simple–but not really difficult, I’m not terribly skilled at building or coding, so was able, between a bunch of F40 srpms and a couple of regular rpms, eventually able to get it all installed.
I’ve requested a few of the packages at EPEL, and Troy Dawson has been extremely helpful, but at this point, many of these packages have to be built from F40 srpms though they might get into EPEL.
RH10 does have the crb repo, but doing a search for epel comes up with nothing, you have to just download an epel-release-10-latest rpm (I might have the name wrong) and install it with rpm -ivh.
I may be wrong and perhaps my wants, wanting a home desktop with a light window manager rather than Gnome is unusual, but I would think that those who do sysadmin stuff, probably mostly on headless machines, would want something lighter at home. So, I haven’t done very much with it yet. As has been mentioned elsewhere on these forums, RH won’t have firefox in RHEL10, but I just downloaded it from mozilla. It’s a bz2 that, when decompressed, is a directory with the binary inside, so your firefox path would be ~/firefox/firefox.
Hopefully, this is of interest to at least some of you.
I would guess that as time goes on, a lot of these desktops (and some window managers) will become packaged. But at present only Gnome is packaged (and maybe KDE).
EL has had only Gnome since which version? Everything else, including KDE, is from third parties. Often EPEL.
Before release of EL8 the EPEL maintainer for MATE did show no interest to continue.
Whether succumbing to pleas or someone else stepping in, MATE is now found in both EPEL 8 and EPEL 9.
Of course porting to Wayland, if not trivially provided by MATE upstream, can break the camel’s back.
There is “playing around with RHEL 10 Beta” and there is “gathering cream and cherry on top of RHEL 10 Beta”. The former is probably the main purpose of the beta (if you ask RH).
For what it’s worth, I tried on another VM. In that time, some of the versions of the FC40 srpms had changed and I could no longer get a working labwc. It’s possible that it will get into EPEL and if it does, great, if not, it’s far from my worst problem. (Or perhaps package versions will change again and it will work next time).
I’m hoping that EPEL creates labwc, foot (or even better, alacritty), and wmenu. At this point it’s getting frustrating as I’m successfully install wlroots and wlroots-devel both at version 0.18, but when I try to install labwc I get a message that it’s missing wlroots => 0.18, so I’m not sure what’s going either.
In fairness, this is a beta and I suspect that @toracat will figure out their issues.
I also got my labwc working again–I had to go down to an older version of it and wlroots. However, it doesn’t run very well, whether that’s the fault of the VM’s or how well it’s dealing with labwc, I don’t know. And wmenu only works on one of the VMs. Oh well, it should be my worst problem in life.
