I mentioned this on Rocky forums, when I did it with RedHat’s version, but figured I’d try a few more test VMs, so used Alma, so I didn’t have to worry about registering.
Anyway, as I think I said on Rocky forums, I suspect my situation isn’t that unusual, using RH or clone at work, wanting to have workstation at home so I get more familiar with it, but not wanting the bloat of Gnome DE. So, as we’re more or less confined to using Wayland, I experimented with labwc. (I’ve also put in some requests on bugzilla for it, wlroots, and few other dependencies). On the Rocky forums, one person responded saying that they would like a working version of Mate, so, I guess there are various wants for it.
I was able to get it to install and work reasonably well on some VMs, (qemu, VBox, and FreeBSD’s BHyve.) I also tried with VMware, but during the install, got a message it couldn’t run Wayland, did I want to do it remotely, so I gave up.
Mostly, I used Fedora 40 srpms. I did find that some of the newer versions, e.g. labwc-0.8 something would fail, due to missing dependencies but 0.7 would work. I also found that with wmenu (similar to dmenu, opens a window to run a command) would not work if I built it from an srpm, but if I took a later version, that didn’t have an srpm (at least on rpmfind) and just downloaded the rpm and installed it, it would work.
It was fairly easy to get working, once I tracked down the dependencies that had to be installed first. They had to be installed in the order I give here, or a package would ask for another package to be installed.
tllist-1.1.0-4.fc40.src.rpm
fcft-3.1.8-1.fc40.src.rpm
libdrm-2.4.120-3.fc40.src.rpm
grim-1.4.1-3.fc40.src.rpm
xcb-util-errors-1.0.1-3.fc40.src.rpm
libliftoff-0.4.1-4.fc40.src.rpm
wlroots-0.17.2-1.fc40.src.rpm
xdg-desktop-portal-wlr-0.7.1-1.fc40.src.rpm
labwc-0.7.1-3.fc40.src.rpm
foot-1.16.1-3.fc40.src.rpm (a Wayland terminal)
And then, wmenu-0.1.7 would build and install but not work. Using
wl-0.1.9-1.fc40.x86_64.rpm and just installing it worked perfectly. When I installed the older version from the srpm, it seemed to be missing the /usr/bin/wmenu-run which is how the program is called.
Hopefully, this interests some people.