Final Term is a new terminal application, currently under development,  written in Vala and built on top of GTK+ 3, Clutter and Mx.

If you can install it easily under Ubuntu through a PPA package, it’s not the case for every OS. It’s packaged for Fedora and downstream. It’s also available in Linux distribution with alternative packages repositories for second-class citizen or denizens packages in Arch AUR, and for Gentoo as a Project SunRise ebuild. These links have been prepared as writing time, and they don’t really look as permanent URLs.

Let’s see how to install it on Debian.

Install  Final Term on Debian Wheezy

If you’re under Debian Wheezy or below, the relevant packages doesn’t provide a recent glib version, and upgrade this unique package would trigger too many dependencies (GNOME for example), so it could be interesting to update all the system to Jessie, the current testing version.

Install  Final Term on Debian Jessie

If you’re under Jessie or an up to date Sid, all is fine.

Installation procedure

Required dependencies

The following dependencies are needed to compile Final Term:

• valac
• cmake
• intltool
• libnotify-dev
• libclutter-gtk-1.0-dev (this one will pull a lot of dependencies)
• libmx-dev (will pull a few other lib dependencies too)
• libkeybinder-3.0-dev (not available on Wheezy)
• libgee-0.8-dev (not available onWheezy)

In a oneliner, this means:

So the blocker for Debian Wheezy are libgee-dev and libkeybinder-dev. For example, 0.8 is required for libgee (0.6 offered). You could consider to install a 0.8 .deb on testing or Ubuntu PPA, but they require an up to date glib version, so it’s probably not a good solution.

Note: libunity-dev isn’t required, as you don’t need to integrate with the Unity launcher.

Compile Final Term

Final Term source is available on GitHub and compiles easily with Vala:

git clone https://github.com/p-e-w/finalterm.git
mkdir finalterm/build
cd finalterm/build
cmake ..
make


Stop at the cmake .. step the time needed  ensure you have all the dependencies.

You now have in your build folder a compiled finalterm executable and all the support files.

Install it

To install it with /usr/local as prefix (the default setting):

To install it into another folder as prefix, set the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH variable. For example to use /usr as prefix and so get the executable in /usr/bin:

Package it

The Fedora package build logs could be useful to understand the logic. It’s from this log I extracted the installation command and how to customize the prefix for example.