How to Install DWM on Linux Mint

so i have a bit of a reputation for hating on linux mint and that reputation is well deserved but that doesn't mean that i look down on anybody who uses it if you like linux mint that's great that's what makes linux awesome you can use whatever the hell you want it's not necessarily for me but whatever but let's just say you're one of those people who like linux mint and you're looking to try out a tiling window manager like say dwm now dwm is not hard to install it's just not it has a reputation for being very prickly towards new users and that reputation is also deserved but it's not actually hard to install even on linux mint so today what i'm going to do is show you how to install dwm on linux mint and the associated programs that you'll need to get up and running so let's go ahead and jump in so the first thing we'll need to do is install the dependencies on systems like arch these dependencies are usually pre-installed but anything based on debian ubuntu anything like that you're gonna have to install these dependencies and it's just the way it is so there are a few of them that you're gonna have to do so i will also put these in the show notes so you can just go ahead and copy and paste them if you want but i'm gonna go ahead and just type them in here so it's going to be sudo apt install rophi lib lib x11 dev lib z i-n-e-r-a-m-a dev s-h-r-s-h-a-r utils and then uh lib xft dev and libc6 and then we'll also need fair wget curl get and we'll also need a terminal that we can use so in this case we'll probably download kitty i think kitty's going to be in the repost so we'll go ahead and hit enter and we'll enter our password and then hit yes for that to install and that will take a minute to install and there may be another one that we have to install later on i'm not exactly sure sometimes you need to install suckles utils or suckles tools sometimes you don't we'll see if that how it works we'll know whether or not suckles builds or not so the next thing we do once this is installed is we actually need to go through and download the sucklus utilities that we're going to use so in this case we're going to need dwm st and d menu all three of those things are obviously needed obviously you'll need dwm but st is the default terminal that dwm uses and while it will make without it it's just easier to have it on hand just in case you need it it's not hard to build and a d menu is the program launcher that dwm uses as well you can use rofi i've installed rofi um here just a minute ago because i'm used to doing that but you don't actually have to do that so that's not a dependency i just happen to prefer rophi but i'm still going to download d menu because d menu by default has some code inside of dwm's configuration file that you know relies on it so let's go ahead and do that so you can pretty much download dwm and all those tools wherever you want but i always go into my dot config file and i make a directory so make directories suckless if i can spell and then i cd into sucklis and this is where i will clone all of the success utilities that i'm going to use because i in in my build i always happen to have several of them i have dwm st tabbed d menu surf this way they can all go in one place so the next thing you'll need to do is go into a web browser and go to suckless.org and of course i can't spell so now we can go there we go and then we want to click on dwm up here at the top scroll down and we just want to go ahead and copy this line here now after a while you'll have this uh whole line here just memorized but it's just easier for me to show you this is basically just going to clone dwm we'll hit enter and that will clone it obviously again this will only work if you have get installed so that's why we installed git earlier we also want to go back up here and do st and there's another line that we'll need to copy it is right here make sure you can actually see that on camera and i'm not covering up with my fat face yep and that will work and that's st and then we also need to do dwm which is under tools and then uh let's see here dwm or excuse me d menu is what we're looking for here it's right there and then we can also just get our d menu and then i keep saying the wrong thing there and we'll do that one so that's the menu so those three are the ones that we need now if we done everything right we can actually go through and make those things now so we cd into dwm which actually what we'll do here is do an ls and we see we have d menu dwm and st so if we cd into dwm and then we just do make and we do sudo if you get this output here that means you've done everything right and you have all the dependencies if you've missed a dependency it will actually list out the dependencies that you need the unfortunate thing is it doesn't use the same package name so you'll have to kind of search around for package name that slash linux mint slash debian or whatever actually uses but as long as you have gone through and done the dependencies that i've shown you you should just be able to get this output here and you've made it just fine fine so now we just need to do sudo make install and then you're done if you haven't already it will ask you there to enter a password but i've already done that so dwm is done so if we do cd and dot slash st that's brings us to the st folder we'll do make again and sudo make install and then we'll clear this again in cd dot slash d menu and then make now you'll see here we've actually ended up with a few errors this is normal okay it uh it just means that there are some things that are unused usually or there are a few other errors but as long as you don't have a make error down here at the bottom it will say make error equals one or something like that at the bottom if you actually have an error that is fatal for to the build and we didn't get that so we should be fine so we're going to do sudo make install here again and it does just fine now we have dwm installed we have all the things that we need to use dwm installed now if you were on a system that wasn't using a display manager you'd be done because you could go through and just do start x in you know whatever and then start up dwm that way but because i'm using a display manager in other words i have a login screen when i log into my computer i actually have to go through and do one more step and that is going to be putting an entry into our x sessions folder so that we can actually choose the dwm session in our display manager so in order to do this we need to do cd into slash user share x sessions okay and if we do an ls right now all we'll see are the cinnamon desktop because that's all i have installed or that's all that my display manager sees that i have installed what we need to do is do sudo touch dwm dot desktop okay now if we do an ls we have the dwm on there now if we do sudo them dwm dot desktop and i'm not going to have them installed so i need to do sudo apt install them once again i will make the comment that them should just be a standard package that every district ships i mean it really just should i mean i don't want to use nano people nano's you know not great it's not for me so sudo vim dwm.desktop and then what we're going to want to do is put in the necessary components of a file like this and they all look exactly the same just with different words and basically what this does is it tells your display manager what to launch what to execute what's basically what it's doing is it's executing a binary from your path and it's very simple so what we need to do is go into insert mode and do bracket desktop entry and then close bracket and then no sp then a space encoding we got to make sure you spell everything right e encoding there we go i'm still making sure i'm just pulling this for you e n c o d ing good good lord matt spelling is hard utf dash eight okay and then name equals dwm and then comment equals the die this can really literally be anything it doesn't really matter um and then exec equals dwm and then ty uh icon equals dwm and type equals x session and you want to make sure you get the capitalization right in these certain spots so this one here has to be capital x capital s and then the rest of the word session this one i'm not sure whether or not that has to be capitalized or not i always have done so i just do it um because i mean you don't want it to break and i always put a couple extra lines after this whether or not it's needed or not i don't know sometimes i i seem to remember getting an error when there wasn't a couple lines afterwards but i don't know whether or not it's actually true or not whatever it's just easier for me to do it and you know not get errors so then we just want to save this so dub colon wq and we're done now what i'm going to do is i'm going to stop this recording here and i'm going to log out and log into dwm and make sure it actually worked and then we'll be done so give me just a second see you on the other side as they say okay and as you can see we have dwms now if you're brand new to dwm just a few extra things just to help you out the default super key in dwm is the alt key now you can change this easily in the settings and it's easy to look up how to do that but just know that if you wanna get into a terminal alt shift and enter will get you into terminal this is st that's why we install it and we you can quit by alt shift and c and you can get into d menu by alt and p those are the three that you're going to need in order to launch programs launch a terminal and close programs so that's will get you off the ground and then you can always make changes if we open up a terminal here into pseudo oops if we zoom in here so in order to zoom in it's control shift and page up in st and if we cd into dot config suckless dwm we remove our config.h folder we don't have to do this i always just do because it will remake that when you do a make command and we do add us them into config.h we can go through down here and change our mod key right here and we can change this to mod 4 mask and we can change then whatever key bindings we want down here in the key binding section easy as that and then when then when you're done you just save that and then do su make and sudo make install and then that is literally how you make changes so that's dwm that's how you do it now now that is it for this video that's literally all there is uh you'll have to forgive the lack of a border around my face uh logging out logging back and messed around with obs for some reason i don't i really ahead and reinstall it it's really dumb i don't like linux mint something that was funky there anyways if you have questions leave them below in the comments i will try to help you i'm not tech support so if i don't get back to you for a few days or if i don't go back to you at all i apologize for that i have other things to do but i will try if you leave a question and have you know or have a question i'll try to help you um you can follow me on twitter at the linux cache you can support me on patreon at patreon.comcast uh right now unfortunately because i don't have all my fancy graphics i can't thank all my patrons by name so um i i know if i switch to patreon there'll actually be nothing there so thank you to the patrons even though your name is not on the screen i do apologize for that this is probably the first time because i've had patreon that i haven't been able to do that so so i don't have your names memorized unfortunately i i just don't so thanks everybody for supporting me on patreon if you haven't already you can go do so it's really easy and i do appreciate everybody who supports me thanks everyone for watching i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: The Linux Cast

Views: 1,517

Rating: 4.9506173 out of 5

Keywords: linux, open source, apps, how to install dwm on linux mint, how to install dwm, how to install dwm and st, how to install st, how to install tiling windowmanger, dwm, dynamic tiling window manager, how to install dwm on mint

Id: Mbgy3cDT610

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021