River

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

Many steps below were taken from the wiki entry for installing Sway.

Installation

Login as root.

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/v3.17/main
#http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.17/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 & configure eudev:

# apk update # setup-devd udev

Then install the mesa gallium drivers:

# apk add mesa-dri-gallium

The following links contain guides for setting up the video stack.

Install River and the documentation:

# apk add river river-doc

Install your choice of additional packages:

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

# apk add adwaita-icon-theme foot ttf-dejavu

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

# rc-update add seatd # rc-service seatd start

Create a new user and update group membership:

# adduser $USER seat # adduser $USER input # adduser $USER video

Logout and log back in as the new user.

Running River

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

install -Dm0755 /usr/share/doc/river/examples/init -t ~/.config/river

Set XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and then start River:

river

Notes

Following are a few notes that are most certainly not related to River whatsoever but rather discovered while running River so I'm tacking them onto the end of this wiki.

Firefox 89.0.1 complains on launch "glxtest: libpci missing", resolved by:

apk add pciutils-libs

Firefox 89.0.1 complains continuously "Unable to load hand2 from the cursor theme", resolved by:

mkdir -p ~/.icons/default ln -s /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/cursors .icons/default/cursors