GUI

The Linux Graphics Stack - June 16, 2012

Startup

http://fbsplash.alanhaggai.org/

Q: "I get a tty1 login before KDM pops up." A: "You could disable tty1. Comment out this line in /etc/inittab: c1:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -8 38400 tty1 linux"

X

Xwindows drives the underlying graphical interface of most if not all Unix/Linux computers providing a GUI. It was developed in 1984 at MIT. After around 35 years of development, tweaking and adding of new hardware and ideas, it is generally acknowledged to be a bit of a beast. It should be remembered that the common configuration at time of development was a single mini running X providing individual views to Xterminals in a timesharing system. Nowadays the norm is X providing a single screen on a desktop or laptop.

All of this means that there are many ways of achieving the same thing and many slightly different things that can meet the same purpose. In modern X versions sometimes you can get away with limited or no configuration. In the last few years the boast is that X is self configuring. Certainly the best practice rule of thumb is less configuration is better - that is only configure what is wrong.

xrandr

xrandr -q
  show possible and current screen resolutions

xdpyinfo | grep 'dimensions:'
  show just current screen resolution in px and mm

devilspie
telak is a program which displays pictures in root window. It can display content of local file, or download image via http. Telak can be configured to refetch picture every n seconds, so it can be used to display image from webcam.

VNC/SSH

x11vnc
- Arch Linux wiki: x11vnc

http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/XoverSSH/X-over-SSH2.html

Fonts

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/subpixel.php

Window Managers

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Uniform_Look_for_Qt_and_GTK_Applications

Openbox

An Openbox Guide

xmonad

xmonad is a dynamically tiling X11 window manager that is written and configured in Haskell. In a normal WM, you spend half your time aligning and searching for windows. xmonad makes work easier, by automating this.

documentation
- man
- wiki
- arch wiki: xmonad
http://xmonad.org/contrib.html

Config

cabal --recompile
  after changing ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs

Utils

http://projects.haskell.org/xmobar/
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xmobar

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dzen
- https://github.com/robm/dzen

Hotkeys

mod shift enter
  start terminal
mod shift c
  close current window

mod w
  reload xmonad

mod space
  rotate through window layouts
mod shift space
  reset to workspace default
mod tab
  tab through windows
super 2
  switch to workspace 2

default keybindings
- http://www.quitsendingmetrash.com/lrn/unix/xmonad.php

Awesome

Config

layouts [1]

http://awesome.naquadah.org/doc/api/

debug rc.lua changes;

Xephyr :1 -ac -br -noreset -screen 1152x720 &
DISPLAY=:1.0 awesome -c ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua.new

If xdg/awesome default config loads instead of .config/awesome, this is due to error in the rc.lua.

Multihead

http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Using_Multiple_Screens

Wibox

comp.window-managers.awesome: Re: Multiple row wibox

Widgets

http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Awesome_3.3_to_3.4#Widget_Layouts

http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Vicious

Obvious

Colours

The color format in awesome is either a standard X color name (blue, darkblue, lightred, etc) or a hexadecimal formatted color (#rrggbb or #rrggbbaa). By using the hexadecimal format, you can also specify an alpha channel: that means that #00ff00 will draw pure green, but #00ff00aa will set the alpha channel to ‘aa’ and will blend the green with the color under it.

Text format

You can use Pango markup in a text string. This allows formating the text rendered inside widgets. Pango markup documentation can be found in the Pango documentation at http://library.gnome.org/devel/pango/stable/PangoMarkupFormat.html.

A Pango markup example: ….