Tiling window manager?

[___]

Hey people! I am looking for a decent tiling window manager (or dynamic wm) and would like to know if anyone has good experiences with them. There are a lot of choices out there and I am running i3 on my desktop machine. Since there is no pnd ports I've found, I was only able to find this post:

I tested e17 when I had pandora
It uses too much ram and is akward to use.
Then I proceeded and forked monsterwm.
It's perfect. Especially since you can do everything with the keyboard.

(snipped out the screenshots)

... in another thread. So my questions would be:

-Is anybody already running a tiling wm on OP and which one did you choose?

-What are your preferences regarding utilities (terminal, menu extensions, info apps/bars)

-Is a tiling wm any good on OP? or should I rather stick with openbox which I am running right now?

-How difficult was the installation (do you need to compile from source, any libraries to get, is it in the repos, did you use git)

Thanks a lot!

For anyone who doesn't know what I am talking about, check out the screenshots in the quoted post or read about tiling wms on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager

they are awesomely fast, highly configurable and let you control your windows by semi-automating the layout and letting you completely control it by keyboard.

PS.: I have looked into some other tiling wms and also found matchbox. I think I remember it from qtopia on gp2x. At a glance I think it could be a nice alternative for the limited screen area of OP. If I find the time I would like to look into it, see if it's a feasible option and maybe try to set up a toolchain and compile it. Not the same thing as a tiling wm though...

 

[___]

Okay, since noone is picking up on this thread, i am going to bump it myself.


,


I tried setting up a decent toolchain on super zaxxon and almost went crazy. Angstrom repos are pretty unavailable and I wasn't able to download the libraries I needed. So i installed a dev environment as pnd and compiled monsterwm as my first try. Compilation was quick, setting up a .xinitrc entry turned out to be difficult. .xinitrc on super zaxxon doesn't follow official standards and was apparently hacked together as a workaround. I did manage to setup a working entry for monsterwm anyway.


After fiddling with all these issues, I decided it wasn't worth bothering with super zaxxon anymore. So I prepared Slackware 14 image and ran that from sdcard.


Great decision! Having repos available and being able to add libs for compilation fairly hassle free is great.


I immediately tried my new found favorite: i3-wm. Compiled the wm, added i3status and menu for good measure and simply ran xwmconfig which automatically changes your xsession to whatever wm you prefer.


I am absolutely loving this setup. Please try it if you haven't yet. I will provide my configs when i have worked out all of the quirks.


cheers!

 

[edgex004]

@xnopasaranx Sorry for the grave-digging here, but I think I'm going to try compiling and installing i3wm from source in SZ. Did you happen to try that at all? If you share your configs, I would probably use them if I can get all the libs compiled in Code::Blocks.

 

[rygD]

What a great thread. I hope people with more experience and tips start posting.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Sorry to gravedig a little, but is there any simple way to install and use i3 on the Pandora? Did anyone build it?

 

[edgex004]

At the moment, the best way for me has been to compile from source and install to NAND (or SD if that is what you run from). Some of the libs fight a bit with defaults, so I put a wrapper around some binaries to use libs copied out of ptitseb's codeblocks. I can try to put together an installer or something over christmas break. There is another thread somewhere where some work was published, so I'll need to look there first...

 

[Silent-Hunter]

At the moment, the best way for me has been to compile from source and install to NAND (or SD if that is what you run from). Some of the libs fight a bit with defaults, so I put a wrapper around some binaries to use libs copied out of ptitseb's codeblocks. I can try to put together an installer or something over christmas break. There is another thread somewhere where some work was published, so I'll need to look there first...

That would be much appreciated! Do you know if things like the battery indicator work correctly?

 

[edgex004]

Yep I got battery indicator working using i3blocks, but you could use conky if you like as well. I looked at this thread and I believe I have resolved all the issues I was having since the last time I posted, but I don't exactly remember how. I will need to review my current installation and try to update the scripts @xnopasaranx made to include i3blocks and make sure the odd rendering issue is fixed.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Oh it doesn't work in i3status? Darn.

 

[edgex004]

Well it should work with simply i3status too. You just need the right config.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Oh OK. I've never used i3blocks before.

 

[edgex004]

It is basically just an easy way to add info to i3bar. Just i3 status with more tools.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Oh cool!

 

[___]

it would be awesome if we could release i3 as an opkg installable package, just as openbox for example. But I am not sure if the required later versions of the libraries make this an impossible task. I guess notaz would have to take a look.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

That would be great, maybe someone should ask him.

 

[edgex004]

With the way I have set up my system, I have reverted back to the firmware version of libs as much as possible. This has broken some parts of i3, such as i3-dmenu-desktop, but the pieces that I use work perfectly: i3bar and dmenu.

On my system I added j4-dmenu-desktop (written in C) instead of of i3-dmenu-desktop(Perl script). It is a lot faster and seems to be okay with the firmware libs.

I also added i3blocks in order to put CPU, RAM, and other such info into i3bar.

The graphical bug I was having is gone, but I am unsure of the cause or the fix, however I suspected it was mangled libs. The only bug I still have is that for some reason nm-applet does not allow me to to bluetooth tethering under i3, but does in xfce. (since everything is off in i3 by default, I run Toggle Bluetooth from j4-dmenu-desktop and start nm-applet and bluetooth-applet from dmenu. Works for bluetooth headphones, but not network tethering)



However, I'm having trouble testing the script @xnopasaranx has created so I can see what is working in his release.

I am trying to create a clean SD card install of SZ to test on and add the pieces that I have compiled, but I can't seem to get it to work. Has anyone else had trouble creating a bootable SD lately? There was a thread previously about needing to go back to an old version of SZ in order for the automated SD creation tools to work.

Since the automated tools don't work on the new versions of SZ, I follow the instructions on the wiki to do it manually, and the first boot hangs after "hub 1-0:1.0: 1 port detected"

Maybe I'm just not letting it sit long enough?

 

[levi]

I used to run my SZ off my left SD card, and I think I may have written those instructions back in the day or some form of them at least. There's no waiting needed - at least before it launches X - booting into XFCE from there can take some time, but only about the same time it take to boot from the NAND flash.

So your autoboot.txt works I take it, and it's loaded the kernel, but it's failing to boot from there. Where did you get your root fs from? I forget where I got it from - but there are promising candidates in the firmware folder as well as the images folder, going by filenames and date stamps. This release of SZ becomes one year old a week after new years!

 

[_jr_]

The only bug I still have is that for some reason nm-applet does not allow me to to bluetooth tethering under i3, but does in xfce. (since everything is off in i3 by default, I run Toggle Bluetooth from j4-dmenu-desktop and start nm-applet and bluetooth-applet from dmenu. Works for bluetooth headphones, but not network tethering)

I haven't looked closely, but it might be the config daemon or other stuff running in the background of xfce.

 

[edgex004]

I haven't looked closely, but it might be the config daemon or other stuff running in the background of xfce.

It ended up working for me yesterday. I had wifi turned on too, though. Will need to try again with no wifi but only bt and nm.

 

[ladyerrant]

I'm running DWM on mine with the systray patch and j4-dmenu-desktop for launching PNDs. I keep meaning to do a writeup of how I set it up. (edit) I've also got the ST terminal compiled up and installed. Much thinner than Terminal, but doesn't respond to all of the same command line options, need to patch it to ignore --icon specifically so you can link ST in place of Terminal