Pages

Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Fedora 38 : Sway on VirtualBox.

Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor and a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11. It works with your existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features, plus a few extras.
You can find this desktop at this GitHub project.
The official webpage comes with a video tutorial on how to use it.
Installation is simple with these commands using the dnf tool:
# dnf group install sway-desktop-environment
# dnf install sway-config-fedora
It is possible to ask you for additional arguments for installation like this: --allowerasing or --skip-broken.
After installation, reboot and select sway from the desktop switcher
NOTE: The display for virtual video card from VirtualBox need to be set to Enable 3D Acceleration.
Let's see the result of this desktop environment ...

Fedora 38 : Openbox from GitHub.

I tried to use the OpenBox desktop environment in Fedora 38 and it seems to be incomplete, see also this thread.
I try to build the Openbox desktop from the source code, see the GitHub project.
$ git clone https://github.com/danakj/openbox.git
$ cd openbox
I need to install these: gettext-devel, glib2-devel, libtool, and pango-devel.X86_64 all devel libraries with dnf tool ...
Use the next commands, you will see some errors about some deprecated libraries and source code when you use the make command.
$ ./bootstrap
$ ./configure
$ make 
The go-to openbox folder to see the result:
$ cd openbox
$ ls -lFGC
The last step is to run the Openbox after you solve these:
Failed to open the display from the DISPLAY environment variable.
Openbox-Message: A window manager is already running on screen 0.
Because you are into environment area you need to close it.
After several attempts, I managed to pass these issues and ran the command:
$ ./xinit
This is the result is this:
I don't really have skills in this field of changes in Linux distributions and I wouldn't want to give wrong indications.