River

Note: This is currently not working as written. Updates in Progress

River is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor. An introduction to River can be found in this blog post by the author for the 0.1.0 release.

This wiki was written starting from a fresh install using the Alpine 3.14.2 x86_64 extended .iso. The steps begin from the first reboot after running setup-alpine and performing a sys install to disk.

First Boot

On the first boot after a new Alpine installation, there are some basic system configuration tasks typically done regardless of whether you plan to run a GUI desktop or not. These are the steps I run through:

Login as root, create a new user and update group membership:

adduser sodface addgroup sodface audio addgroup sodface input addgroup sodface video addgroup sodface wheel

Install sudo and run visudo, uncommenting the desired permissions for the wheel group:

apk update apk add sudo && visudo

Logout and log back in as the new user.

Test ssh login from a remote computer.

Verify that you can run commands with sudo.

Installation

Edit the repositories file and uncomment the community and testing repos. For 3.14.2, we need edge/community to get the correct software versions to support River:

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.14/main #http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.14/community #http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing

Install River and the documentation:

sudo apk add river river-doc mandoc

Edit the repositories file again to toggle back to the 3.14/community repository before installing additional software:

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.14/main http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.14/community #http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main #http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing

Install your choice of additional applications:

This list includes icons, browser, fonts, and a terminal emulator named foot which is the default in River's sample init file that we will use later.

sudo apk add adwaita-icon-theme firefox foot ttf-dejavu

Running River

Before running River for the first time, copy the sample init file from /etc/river to ~/.config:

install -Dm0755 /etc/river/init -t ~/.config/river

Set seatd to start automatically at next boot and also manually start it for this session:

sudo rc-update add seatd sudo rc-service seatd start

sudo addgroup sodface seat

Logout and log back in again.

Start River:

XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp river

Configuration and Usage

An example config is provided at /etc/sway/config. Copy it to ~/.config/sway/config and read through it to learn the default keybindings.

For additional information, start at man 5 sway and read the upstream FAQ.