Colorscheme on Microsoft Windows

After a little bit of hacking, I've succeeded in getting GNOME Colorscheme to run under windows XP. I had to hack a few things to get it to build, and it's still not perfect. For instance, in addition to making gconf optional, I made libgnomeui optional as well. The end result is that it doesn't have quite the functionality available on linux, but it's still relatively useable.

I haven't yet committed the changes I had to make to get it to work, but will soon. If you want to try it out, you should install gtkmm 2.8 with Cedric's Windows gtkmm installer (the developer environment, not just the runtime), and also install MinGW, and the autotools from cygwin. You'll have to use the following commandline for now:

./configure --disable-gconf --disable-gnomeui --datadir="c:\some\path\to\install\icons\etc"

By the way, that last little --datadir switch feels really ugly to me. Does anybody know how people usually do this stuff on windows? I'd prefer to use autoconf and automake on Windows, but doing so results in a datadir variable set to something like /usr/local/share, which is valid within a cygwin shell, but obviously not when running the compiled program outside of cygwin. I've worked around this by specifying an explicit datadir, but if feels like there should be a better way... Anybody?

Off to Austin

Well, it's finally time for me to take a vacation. This time it's just me and Joanne (and some friends) instead of a trip to see family. We haven't done that in a long time. We're heading to the SXSW music festival in Austin, TX for about 5 days. Good music, lots of beer, and warm weather. Yee haw.

I'll be leaving the computer at home, so no coding for the next week or so. To make up for it, though, I committed a few things to cairomm before leaving. I spent a little time this afternoon checking out cairomm on Windows. It turns out that it didn't compile cleanly (surprise, surprise), but the fixes were just a matter of changing a few #include statements. Well, I hope so at least. I didn't get around to testing out the functionality, I just verified that it now compiles. In addition, I committed a small example to the repository showing how to display text with cairomm. It's basically just a translation of a cairo test into C++ / cairomm.