Anthony Campbell's Blog 1

Note: this post is retained only for historical interest. The recent versions of Spectrwm compile without any problems

The current version of spectrwm in Sid (1.0.0) is old and there are many improvements in later versions. You can compile it quite easily yourself but there dependency requirements. This command will download the necessary packages.

sudo apt-get install "^libxcb*..*-dev$" libx11-xcb-dev libxrandr-dev libxft-dev libxt-dev

This comes courtesy of kbmonkey - see http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/21630/building-spectrwm-20/

So the steps are:

1, Run the above command to install all the dependencies.
2. Download the spectrwm source code and unpack it.
3. Move to the resulting directory and then to the linux subdirectory (~/spectrwm-2..x.x/linux).
4. Do "make"

If all goes well you should have a binary in that subdirectory which you can run in the usual way (e.g. from .xinitrc).

One warning: when you run the executable you may see error messages about a missing /usr/local/lib/libswmhack.so.0.0. The simplest solution is to copy this library from the linux subdirectory to /usr/local/lib and then run ldconfig.