Sunday, December 30, 2012

freebsd and dim of the yard!

I installed FreeBSD today with dim: A pure-Python window manager for the X window system. I like the minimalism of them both as well as being able to tag groups of windows. Below are my notes.


  1. Did a default FreeBSD install
  2. Updated to the latest ports
  3. Install only the packages you need:
    pkg_add -r xorg xorg-fonts urwfonts freetype py27-xpyb 
               libXfontcache xdm portupgrade git bash emacs 
               chromium 
    
  4. Configure X
  5. Clone dim from github
  6. Configure a .xession:
    xset m 12/4/8
    xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xdefaults
    xsetroot -solid steelblue
    xterm &
    exec /usr/local/src/dim/bin/dim
    
Make sure you have the latest FreeBSD port of xpyb. The port tree upgrade above should cover you but if you do not have at least 1.3.1 try:
portsnap fetch
portsnap extract
portsnap update
pkg_install -r portupgrade
portupgrade -R py27-xpyb