As with the icecc post, I’m moving xmonad from one server to another for “less downtime”1.

I had all the configuration files in my rc github repo, but I didn’t document what to actually do, so here we go:

  • Take a fresh debian container
    • You probably want to adduser hejohns and apt install sudo and adduser hejohns sudo since we want to ssh -X into this box later2
  • Install ghc/cabal w/ ghcup
    • See https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/install/
    • Install the required system packages (eg curl, libffi-dev, libgmp-dev, …)
    • Do their curl | sh thing
    • If this container is just for xmonad, can do a minimal ghcup install
    • Can probably just use the default version of ghc. You can ghcup tui to install something newer, but if you pick something too bleeding edge, you might get cabal package constraint errors later
  • Install xmonad
    • See https://xmonad.org/INSTALL.html
    • Install the required system dependencies (eg libx11-dev, libxss-dev, …)
    • cabal update
    • cabal install --lib xmonad xmonad-contrib for the libraries xmonad needs on recompile
    • cabal install xmonad for the actual executable
  • You still need some X infrastructure for xmonad to work
    • At the least, you need apt install x11-utils or else xmonad will error out on some missing executable
    • This might be included in apt install xorg
    • I don’t know anything about X, so I don’t even know if you need an X server or not– but I think it didn’t work until I installed one
  • I’m lazy, so xmonad --recompile and wait for it to error out b/c of the missing xmonad.hs
  • This creates ~/.config/xmonad for you (for create it yourself)
  • git clone the rc repo or equivalent (for xmonad.hs, .xsession, and associated systemd files)
  • cp the xmonad.hs into ~/.config/xmonad
  • Confirm that xmonad --recompile works now
  • xmonad --replace won’t work yet since the X env isn’t setup properly
  • cp the systemd files in rc under etc/systemd/user to their respective place in the actual system
  • You probably need to systemctl --user enable the two services
  • cp the xsession into ~/.xsession
  • Finally add (bash ~/.xsession > /dev/null 2>&1 &) or equivalent to your .bashrc

Summary

Now, when you’re on your desktop, you can ssh -X into this box we just setup and when the bashrc gets sourced on login, the xsession file will also run and start the systemd user target to fire up xmonad and xcompmgr.

Oh right, so you probably want to install xcompmgr as well. The systemd file in the repo currently assumes it was installed with nix, but you can just install it with apt and change the path. (I did that just now.)

My desktop is a “dumb” client (actually, it’s a minimally configured debian + xfce install), so I can outsource the ghc and xmonad mess to another machine this way.

Why the fuss with systemd? xmonad used to segfault all the time for some reason, and having your (remote) window manager suddenly stop really sucks. A systemd user service that automatically restarts seemed like the right solution. (When xmonad restarts, all the tilings get reset, but at least a window manager is still running.)

Actually, I don’t think I’ve had xmonad segfault in a long time now, but the principle stands.

  1. I’m reproducing the xmonad setup on the Dell T130 (Pentium G4600) to a container on the Lenovo P720 (dual Xeon 6142s), so I can restart other stuff w/o killing my window manager ↩

  2. I did this all as root the first time, and had to do it all over again as my own user since so much of the ghcup and X stuff is per-user. ↩