Arch Linux

Flapper

Member

Registered: 2019-02-10

Posts: 46

[Solved] R will only start in xfce4-terminal

When I first installed Arch, I installed Xfce, and r among other packages.
Now I am using a Wayland compositor (river, although I have tried sway and hyprland).
I have removed most of the xfce packages (although I am keeping thunar). I am using alacritty as my terminal now.

However, if I remove xfce4-terminal, r will not launch. I get a message in the journal:

fuzzel[192901]: application: xfce4-terminal -e R: failed to execute: No such file or directory

(fuzzel creates an app menu from .desktop entries)
My question is, where does the "xfce4-terminal -e" bit come from?
The ./usr/share/applications/r.desktop file is

[Desktop Entry]
Name=R
GenericName=environment for statistical computing
Comment=language and environment for statistical computing and graphics
Exec=R
Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/r.png
DocPath=/usr/lib/R/doc/html/index.html
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=true
Type=Application
Categories=Math;Science;Education

- no mention of xfce4-terminal there? There are no other r.desktop's.

I assume it must be D-bus that is trying to open xfce4-terminal. Is there any way to change D-bus's behaviour?

Last edited by Flapper (2024-02-11 11:06:03)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,480

Website

Re: [Solved] R will only start in xfce4-terminal

So you're not running r directly, but rather running it through a desktop runner.  That desktop file has Terminal=true, so the desktop runner (fuzzel I guess) selects what terminal to launch in order to run the program.  So this would be part of fuzzel's configuration I presume.  Or that just falls back on xdg-open which checks for a few common terminals.

FYI, from fuzzel's config man page:

*terminal*
    terminal command to use when launching 'terminal' programs, e.g. "xterm -e". Default: $TERMINAL -e.

Last edited by Trilby (2024-02-10 22:33:04)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

Flapper

Member

Registered: 2019-02-10

Posts: 46

Re: [Solved] R will only start in xfce4-terminal

I explicitly set terminal=alacritty -e in fuzzel.ini and this has fixed it, thank you.
I didn't have a $TERMINAL environment variable, only $TERM.