LabWC

LabWC is a stacking Wayland compositor. LabWC can serve as a drop-in replacement for the Openbox window manager.

Installation

Internet connectivity, unless the packages have been pre-fetched into a local cache.
Install appropriate Graphics driver drivers for your hardware. Without graphics drivers, errors are likely to occur when starting your desktop.
A non-root user account.
The community repository must be enabled.
Set up eudev.
Install and enable D-Bus. Without D-Bus, icons and keyboard shortcuts may be missing.

The setup-wayland-base script installs and enables elogind as seat manager, enables community repository and enables eudev automatically as these are required for Wayland to work.

Set up eudev

Setting up eudev as device manager on desktop systems is recommended in Alpine Linux. Without a fully functional device manager, users will not be able to connect to input devices. The alpine-conf package provides setup-devd script to easily install and setup device managers.

To set up eudev, issue the command:

# setup-devd udev

Setup up a seat manager

Wayland compositors need raw access to input and output devices. This is mediated by a seat manager.

Configure either seatd or elogind as both are supported. However using both may lead to conflicts.

Install fonts

Install DejaVu fonts, which has good Unicode coverage:

# apk add font-dejavu

Install labwc

We can now install labwc:

# apk add labwc labwc-doc # apk add \ # Install optional dependencies: xwayland \ # recommended for compatibility reasons foot \ # default terminal emulator rofi \ # default application launcher (dmenu could be used instead) swaylock \ # lockscreen tool swaybg \ # wallpaper daemon swayidle \ # idle management (DPMS) daemon dbus-x11

Running LabWC

To run labwc from console:

$ dbus-launch labwc

dbus-launch labwc is used because pipewire needs it, it is included in dbus-x11 and you may omit it.

(if you run labwc with seatd-launch, you will need to use $ dbus-launch seatd-launch labwc)

You can also create a simple alias in your shell rc file (e.g. .zshrc), like:

alias labwcinit="dbus-launch seatd-launch labwc"

Note:

swaylock needs to be able to read your /etc/shadow file to be able to validate your password

Configuration

LabWC aims to implement the openbox 3.4 specification, so many things working in OpenBox should be compatible.

Moreover, the project provides examples for all the configuration files and some themes, explaining where it must be located each one of them.

For additional information, labwc manpages and wiki can be consulted.