River

River is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor.

Note: Before installing any desktop,

Ensure you have Internet connectivity. If the test fails, setup your Internet access first, before you proceed further.
Create a non-privileged user account for security reasons, if you skipped this step during Installation.
Enable community repository.
Install graphics driver for your video hardware.

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.

Installation

Install River and the documentation:

# apk add river river-doc

river-doc is required if you want use the example config.

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 font-dejavu

Set up eudev

Setting up eudev on a desktop system 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.

Setup eudev.

# setup-devd udev

For more details and other options see eudev.

Install Graphics Drivers

Install graphics driver for your video hardware. Without proper driver, River will fail to start.

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 and configure seatd to start automatically.

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

Troubleshooting

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