'grasping the Pi, part 2: an SD card full of awesome'

26th Aug 2012
2 min read
Tags:
programming,
raspberry pi

I don't really know much about minimalistic window managers: I use GNOME 3 (which is a story of its own), but have tinkered with xmonad (a window manager written in Haskell), so I decided to install in onto the Pi and set up a VNC server to be able to actually see what was going on from my laptop.

xmonad, however, wasn't in the Arch ARM repository and I didn't have any idea of how long compiling it would take. I therefore took the path of least resistance and installed openbox, a famous window manager (sudo pacman -S openbox obmenu obconf + a bunch of X libraries).

Setting up the VNC server was quite straightforward: I used the guide from the Arch wiki to install TightVNC (package name tightvnc).

I also copied a small script from here that would start and stop the VNC server with just one command (I didn't register it as a service -- Arch Linux uses init, a different way of managing services and starting the system, so the script sits in my home directory).

I then started the VNC server and connected to it from my laptop by installing tightvnc on it as well and typing

gvncviewer 192.168.1.161:1

(the IP address obviously is not constant) which gave me a completely empty screen with a cursor (standard X "desktop").

I obviously forgot to start openbox, which could be easily fixed by adjusting the ~/.vnc/xstartup file:

export XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1
exec ck-launch-session openbox-session ```

which didn't work since I forgot to install ConsoleKit. After I did, OpenBox launched normally (except for some strange graphical glitches).

I also decided to try out a more awesome window manager (couldn't resist making that joke) called awesome by doing

```sudo pacman -S awesome```

and changing the line in xstart to say exec awesome.

[![Image](http://mildbyte.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/awesome.png?w=792)](http://mildbyte.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/awesome.png)

*(more awesome + some moire artifacts)*

I didn't play around more with awesome though (I did think of setting it up on my laptop eventually), since I never planned to connect my Pi to a screen and make it into a traditional computer with a desktop environment and VNCing to it over the network seems like a waste of bandwidth. I moved on to a different goal -- setting up the wireless.