River
River is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor.
Prerequisites
- Internet connectivity, unless the packages have been pre-fetched into a local cache.
- A non-root user account.
- The community repository must be enabled.
- Set up eudev.
- Install and configure D-Bus. without D-Bus icons and keyboard shortcuts may be missing.
- Install appropriate Graphics driver drivers for your hardware. Without graphics drivers, errors are likely to occur.
- Wayland compositors need raw access to input and output devices, typically mediated by a seat manager. Either seatd or elogind work fine, but installing both leads to conflicts.
- Installing wayland-base enables elogind as seat manager, enables community repository and enables eudev.
Installation
Install River and the documentation:
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
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