I’m wondering if anyone is using and/or knows how to install Awesome on openSUSE 11.4? The only “official-looking” repository that includes it seems to be x11:windowmanagers, but Awesome is not currently available. They also seem to only include the previous (more than two year old) version 2, not the current version 3.
As usual there are quite a few other not-so-official-looking (yeah I don’t understand the build service) repositories that also have it, but randomly trying them is not tempting (I tried one of them but it failed to log in, I just got dropped back to the login screen).
So if anyone has any experience with how to get Awesome properly installed it would be greatly appreciated
Not sure what its actually called to be installed and you may have to log out, select session type (bottom left corner of login screen) and pick Awesome, like you would pick KDE or GNOME to switch back and forth. I suggest you read their documentation before proceeding on.
>
> So what if you add in this openSUSE 11.4 repository without the quotes?
>
>> “http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/windowmanagers/openSUSE_11.4/”
>
> Not sure what its actually called to be installed and you may have to
> log out, select session type (bottom left corner of login screen) and
> pick Awesome, like you would pick KDE or GNOME to switch back and forth.
> I suggest you read their documentation before proceeding on.
>
that repo doesn’t at present contain awesome. it used to, but then it
didn’t work properly and, as the OP wrote, it’s a pretty old version of
awesome.
it has “tumbleweed” in it’s name while i DO NOT run tumbleweed, but oS
11.4 / 64bit. i was careful to only install awesome and it’s cairo
dependencies. (for awesome, cairo has to be compiled with different
options than oS normally does). i also assigned lower priority (higher
num. value) to the repo, and the rpm.s i’m using get updated while nothing
else is affected.
i’m aware this may lead to trouble eventually, but at the moment it works
fine. wouldn’t recommend it for people who’re not comfortable solving
dependency problems if & when they arise.
Thanks for the suggestion phanisvara. I’ve tried to install awesome from that repository, but I’m getting the same problem as before. Basically my procedure is:
Install using zypper install awesome.
Reboot.
Select awesome as the window manager at the login screen.
After entering my password the screen flashes, and after a second or two I’m back at the login screen.
This problem is the same when I try wmii or scrotwm from x11:windowmanagers too, so I haven’t actually been able to get any tiling window manager to work with openSUSE :.
Any suggestions what might be wrong here, or anywhere I can look for more specific error messages? When I try logging in a screen quicly flashes, and the only error seems to be that mcelog failed to start, which is listed under “Failed services in runlevel 5”.
>
> Thanks for the suggestion phanisvara. I’ve tried to install awesome from
> that repository, but I’m getting the same problem as before. Basically
> my procedure is:
>
> Install using zypper install awesome.
> Reboot.
> Select awesome as the window manager at the login screen.
> After entering my password the screen flashes, and after a second or
> two I’m back at the login screen.
>
> This problem is the same when I try wmii or scrotwm from
> ‘x11:windowmanagers’
> (https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=X11%3Awindowmanagers)
> too, so I haven’t actually been able to get any tiling window manager to
> work with openSUSE :.
>
> Any suggestions what might be wrong here, or anywhere I can look for
> more specific error messages? When I try logging in a screen quicly
> flashes, and the only error seems to be that mcelog failed to start,
> which is listed under “Failed services in runlevel 5”.
>
no, unfortunately not. i’ve seen similar symptoms as you describe when X
didn’t work due to video driver problems, but i assume that your “normal”
session, i.e., GNOME or KDE, works ok – or does it?
While in xfce and xfwm4 is running, run the command awesome --replace in the terminal
If the xfwm4 is not changed to awesome, look for the error in the terminal.
It turns out that if I first go to the “session and startup” settings of XFCE and change xfwm4’s restart style to “never”, then do “killall xfwm4” followed by either wmii or scrotwm then it works, but I then have kind of a ******* environment it seems, with the terminal I originally started wmii or scrotwm in having to stay open, and the XFCE desktop existing as a window as well. Awesome still does not run, the error is “awesome: symbol lookup error: awesome: undefined symbol: cairo_xcb_surface_create”, but I’m really just interested in a good tiling window manager, so I suspect either wmii or scrotwm should work well enough.
So does anyone have any idea why I have to launch wmii or scrotwm from XFCE? I would very much like for it to work by simply selecting wmii or scrotwm from the login screen.
On 10/17/2011 01:46 PM, Quantumboredom wrote:
>
> I’m wondering if anyone is using and/or knows how to install ‘Awesome’
> (http://awesome.naquadah.org/) on openSUSE 11.4? …]
It’s not an official repo, with all the warnings. As I recall, I had to
install a few packages (apart from ‘awesome’ itself) from the repo, to
get it going:
Thanks for the suggestion Taki, but I still have the same problem when trying to start awesome from the login screen, and if I do it after first logging in to XFCE and closing xfwm4 I still get the same error message as before (“awesome: symbol lookup error: awesome: undefined symbol: cairo_xcb_surface_create”). I’ve installed all the (64-bit) libcairo stuff that shows up in a zypper search.
But as I said I think I would be quite happy if I could get either of awesome, wmii or scrotwm running from the login screen, so if anyone has any clever ideas on how to do that please do tell
Okay so I might have solved it for wmii at least. I copied the already existing ~/.xinitrc.template to ~/.xinitrc, and added:
until wmii; do
true
done
where the file says to add user code. This seems to allow me to launch wmii from the login screen, at least I haven’t seen any funky behaviour so far. Even though I know neither why it works nor what it does, it at least lets me explore wmii properly
> Thanks for the suggestion Taki, but I still have the same problem when
> trying to start awesome from the login screen, and if I do it after
> first logging in to XFCE and closing xfwm4 I still get the same error
> message as before (“awesome: symbol lookup error: awesome: undefined
> symbol: cairo_xcb_surface_create”). I’ve installed all the (64-bit)
> libcairo stuff that shows up in a zypper search.
good to know there’s a repo in the same OBS project that’s not compiled
against tumbleweed; wasn’t there when i installed my version, i believe.
when i researched that error, quite some time earlier, via an awesome
mailing list, i found that cairo had to be compiled with options slightly
different from those used here (openSUSE) by default. that’s why i not
only installed those packages named awesome-*, but also switched cairo &
related to that repo. from then on i could get awesome to run under
openSUSE normally, i.e., from the login screen.
that you (OP) have problems getting the login manager to work properly,
without first killing this or that, seems like a different problem to me,
not related to awesome or tiling WMs in general.
Just to finish off the thread for anyone else wanting awesome, using the above repository seems to work well for me too. I just had to switch the vendor for the libcairo* packages to that repository (using the zypper install --from command).
