How to install Xcrysden on an arch-based distro

you start by of course going to the aur, coning it and doing a makepkg. For me the missing dependencies are:

So naively you would install these as: sudo pacman -S ..., then:



error: target not found: tk-togl
error: target not found: bwidget

Ok, just the rest then and those from the aur: Tk-togl and bwidget. You clone these in whatever you designated as you "programs" folder, tk-togl compiles quite well. You install it with sudo pacman -U tk-togl-2.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst, and the same for bwidget. You go back to the xcrysden repo as it now should have all the dependencies, you do a makepkg, install it, everything seems to have install quite well. But if you now try to open the program, nothing happens... We get a clue of what's wrong if we open it from the command line as it gives the following error:


Error in startup script: can't find package BWidget
while executing
"package require BWidget"
(file "/usr/share/xcrysden/Tcl/xcInit.tcl" line 460)

Ok weird we did install it tho, I'll show you how to fix this; First we'll remove the bwidget folder in our "programs" folder, but not actually removing the program from pacman. Then we'll re-clone bwidget but now the github repo, then we'll tell xcrysden where it'll find bwidget by going to this file /usr/share/xcysden/Tcl/xcInit.tcl and going to line 460. Here the command "package require Bwidget" fails as bwidget_dir isn't specified correctly, we'll fix this by just giving it the path to the cloned repo. So before the line "package require BWidget" we insert


set BWidget_dir /home/arthur/Programs/bwidget
lappend auto_path $BWidget_dir

Of course if your name isn't arthur and your bwidget is located at the exact same location as mine, change that path. And now it works!

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