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Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

This is an old revision of the document!


awesome (Dynamic Window Manager) as a WM for Slackware

awesome is a highly configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. Primarly targeted at power users, developers and any people dealing with every day computing tasks and who want to have fine-grained control on theirs graphical environment. It is very fast and heavily extensible using the Lua programming language.
Licensed under the GNU GPLv2 license.

Dependencies

Prior to installing awesome, you will need the following dependencies installed first:

note: All of the above are available at slackbuilds.org

Installation

If you have installed all of the above dependencies, you can now proceed with the build of awesome.

Grab the slackbuild from here (slackbuilds.org).
Build it.
And then install the produced package.

Use awesome as your WM

You can select awesome as your Window Manager by running xwmconfig from a terminal.

  1. Open your terminal of choice.
  2. Run 'xwmconfig'
  3. Select xinitrc.awesome from the menu and hit enter.

This way when you start X, awesome will be picked up as your WM.

Configure awesome

By default, if there is no local config, awesome will read the default config from /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua and use it.
If you want to use your own configuration, you will need to do the following.

  1. Create a directory for awesome configuration file
    mkdir -p ~/.config/awesome/
  2. Copy the default awesome config
    cp /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua ~/.config/awesome/

Now you can go and change ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua to reflect you preferences.

If you want, you can go and read this great wiki page, about what is possible to do with the configuration file.

Some examples for own my customizations:

  • modkey = Mod1 - (line 53) this changes the modkey to Mod4/Mod1 (Windows/Alt key). By default it is Mod4
  • terminal = terminator - (line 44) this changes the terminal to terminator (my favorite terminal). By default it is xterm

Links

Sources

 howtos:window_managers:awesome ()