Installing Thunar

This page contains information about how to install Thunar on your system. Thunar can be installed in various ways, depending on whether there is a binary package available for your system. Check if you are using one of the distributions listed in the Binary packages section below and follow the installation instructions on the distribution specific page. If your distribution is not listed below, there may still be binary packages available, but the packager simply did not add the instructions to this wiki yet. If so, please ask the packager to add instructions to the wiki.

If no binary packages are available for your system, or you don’t want to use them for whatever reason, you can install Thunar (and it’s dependencies) from source tarballs, or from an SVN snapshot. See the section Installing from source below.

Binary packages of Thunar are available for the following systems. Click on the link to see the installation instructions.

• Debian/Ubuntu
• SUSE

When installing Thunar from source, you can either install from a release tarball, or from a SVN snapshot. Note that you don’t need to install libexo and xfce4-dev-tools as described below, if your distribution probably already offers binary packages for them.

If you want to install from a release tarball, you’ll need to fetch the tarballs from the Download page first (be sure to also download the libexo tarball). Next, extract the downloaded tarballs:

tar xzf libexo-VERSION.tar.gz
tar xzf Thunar-VERSION.tar.gz

You’ll need to install libexo first. For example, let’s say you want to install to /usr/local, you’d use the following commands:

cd libexo-VERSION
./configure --prefix="/usr/local"
make
sudo make install
cd ..

The last step - make install - must be run as root when installing to a system location, hence the sudo prefix. You may also use su -c “make install”.

Now you can install Thunar using the following commands:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"
cd Thunar-VERSION
./configure --prefix="/usr/local"
make
sudo make install
cd ..

The first line is important, because the $PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable must be set properly, otherwise Thunar is unable to locate libexo on your system.

If everything went well, you should be able to launch Thunar now using the command Thunar (or selecting Thunar File Manager from the menu). Be sure to have /usr/local/bin in your $PATH and there is no Thunar process left in background (You can either use a taskmanager or “Thunar -q” command to do that).

You can also choose to install the latest development version from the Xfce SVN Repository. But be aware that development versions aren’t garantied to be stable, so if unsure, install from a release tarball as described above. When installing from a SVN snapshot, you’ll need libexo and Thunar source code as described above, and in addition, you’ll need the Xfce Developer Tools.

First you’ll need to check out and install the developer tools:

svn co http://svn.xfce.org/svn/xfce/xfce4-dev-tools/trunk xfce4-dev-tools
cd xfce4-dev-tools
./autogen.sh --prefix="/usr/local"
make
sudo make install
cd ..

Next, you’ll need to install the extension library:

svn co http://svn.xfce.org/svn/xfce/libexo/trunk libexo
cd libexo
./autogen.sh --prefix="/usr/local"
make
sudo make install
cd ..

And finally you can checkout and install Thunar:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"
svn co http://svn.xfce.org/svn/xfce/thunar/trunk Thunar
cd Thunar
./autogen.sh --prefix="/usr/local"
make
sudo make install
cd ..

See the note about the $PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable in the tarball installation instructions above.

If everything went well, you should be able to launch Thunar now using the command Thunar (or selecting Thunar File Manager from the menu). Be sure to have /usr/local/bin in your $PATH and there is no Thunar process left in background (You can either use a taskmanager or “Thunar -q” command to do that).

Additional information can be found on the Subversion access page.