• From: Pittsburgh, PA
  • Registered: 2011-09-01
  • Posts: 446

Topic: Dipping into dwm, wish me luck!

I'll be doing a debian netinstall on a small partition on my netbook, and I'm going to try to set up dwm on it. It's the same guy that made the very popular dmenu (we <3 dmenu here at #! D:<) and surf. I figure I should be able to put together a well running, very small OS that I can eventually move off to my (heck, might just do it from there in the first place) and keep with me.

I'll post more in this thread as I move ahead with this small project in the near future. TBH, doing a netinstall for real is new for me. big_smile My first steps are going to be like this:

deb netinstall (no X, nothing extra)
set up eth0 (/etc/network/interfaces)
install unzip stuff
wget smxi.org/smxi.zip && unzip smxi.zip && smxi/smxi (or whatever the command is)

get some stuff installed with that and then it'll be

lynx to get dwm source, edit what I need to and compile it, test it out! <3

  • From: Finland
  • Registered: 2009-01-18
  • Posts: 50

Re: Dipping into dwm, wish me luck!

Besides OS X 10.6 and Haiku alpha3, there's a Squeeze netinstall running LXDE with dwm as the window manager on my Aspire netbook and I love it! 100% keyboard driven with one graphical (in case a family member needs to browse the web) and one command line application for every task - just like #! lol

  • From: inside Ed
  • Registered: 2011-07-25
  • Posts: 2,867

Re: Dipping into dwm, wish me luck!

as root

dhclient eth0 (if it doesn't work, put iface eth0 inet dhcp in ENi and run ifup eth0)
cd /usr/local/bin
wget http://smxi.org/smxi.zip
apt-get install unzip xorg suckless-tools mercurial 
unzip smxi
smxi (do your thang)
apt-get build-dep dwm
exit

as user

mkdir src
cd src
hg clone http://hg.suckless.org/dwm
cd dwm
make && su -c 'make install'
LVM | Catalyst | Wireless
  • From: Pittsburgh, PA
  • Registered: 2011-09-01
  • Posts: 446

Re: Dipping into dwm, wish me luck!

Yay! What a hero! I'll have to remember to copy my aliases and functions to it, or I'll muck everything up!

mkcdr is a function
mkcdr ()
{
    mkdir -p -v -p -v $1;
    cd $1
}

I probably use that one at least a bunch.

  • From: Pittsburgh, PA
  • Registered: 2011-09-01
  • Posts: 446

Re: Dipping into dwm, wish me luck!

D:< None of the shortcuts are working, I guess I need to fix my mod keys or something. sad Help would be appreciated. Right now I made .xinit and put the line `exec dwm` in it. If I `startx` as root, it'll load it! YAY! Except nothing else is working. I can open something if I want (xeyes, surf, whatever) but I can't switch windows, or close windows, or open another terminal. I've no idea what I'm doing. I'm going to try it out on my main #! installation and see if that makes things any easier.

  • From: Italy
  • Registered: 2012-02-04
  • Posts: 3

Re: Dipping into dwm, wish me luck!

Introduction
A Review And Tutorial Of The DWM Window Manager

  • From: Pittsburgh, PA
  • Registered: 2011-09-01
  • Posts: 446

Re: Dipping into dwm, wish me luck!

wah-yeah! Skipped over doing it on the fresh netinst (wasn't working well, IDK) and did it to my main installation. With SLiM, you have to edit ~/.xsessions to something like this:

#!/bin/sh

case $1 in
openbox)
    exec openbox-session
    ;;
dwm)
    exec dwm
    ;;
esac

and /etc/slim.conf needs one line changed:

sessions    openbox-session

to 

sessions    openbox-session,dwm

At SLiM, you can hit f1 to choose between dwm and openbox. Now I'll have to edit some stuff and recompile, but it's working fine! I do seem to be, at boot, using less memory in openbox than dwm. We'll see how that stands up after I do some tweaking. big_smile

  • From: Pittsburgh, PA
  • Registered: 2011-09-01
  • Posts: 446

Re: Dipping into dwm, wish me luck!

Okay, I've been using this for a bit tonight and I love it. big_smile I didn't think I'd like a tiling WM on such a small screen (1024x600) but it's totally workable. I think I'll muck about with awesomewm and scrotwm too, although I've still got quite a bit of messing around with this to deal with. I may end up staying with dwm for a long long time, who knows? I'm going to be adding some of the patches in tomorrow if I get a chance, and work on getting that notification system working, too.

  • From: #! NightClub
  • Registered: 2011-06-02
  • Posts: 3,869

Re: Dipping into dwm, wish me luck!

Even on a smaller screen a tiler can do great, heavy text editing when you open two files and they fit the screen automatically is just great and you have the tags/workspaces, no need to minimize anything.

And on a laptop with total keyboard control, awesome.

I switch sometimes to Xfce for some heavy GUI apps but I am so addicted, in my case with Scrotwm.

Font Task Force | The ultimate MPD guide | Little MOC how-to

The sound of #! COFFEE
  • From: Pittsburgh, PA
  • Registered: 2011-09-01
  • Posts: 446

Re: Dipping into dwm, wish me luck!

I'll definitely be trying scrotwm and awesome. A few issues with dwm I'm having and will try sorting out:
1) I'd like to change the order of the stack, but can't seem to figure out how. SHIFT + MOD  + J or K doesn't work, at least not last night. sad
2) Floating windows are going beneath tiled windows, and I can't seem to get them to pop up to the top. Not with everything, though. It's weird.
3) I've got a lot of shortcuts to learn and remember, that's not a fault of the WM though.
4) Going to be adding keyboard shortcuts for moving and resizing floating windows. Patches are neat!

  • From: Pittsburgh, PA
  • Registered: 2011-09-01
  • Posts: 446

Re: Dipping into dwm, wish me luck!

yay! screenshot! http://i.imgur.com/8nj1U.png

Going to finish setting up twmn and be using this for a while, I think.