Awesome [22 Dec 2009]

The best Window Manager ever
Many thanks to Gianfranco Ciotti, Truelite, Florence (IT), who showed it to me at the last LinuxDay, October 2009.

My Operating System

Debian Squeeze (testing)

Install Packages

First I installed a clean Debian without Desktop Environment (just the base system).
Then I installed the packages: 

# apt-get install xorg awesome

Last step is to install a Login Manager. You can choose the one you prefer (GDM, XDM, KDM...). I installed slim, which is very light and easily configurable. 

# apt-get install slim

Configure slim

In Debian the slim package is configured to run the login manager automatically after the boot (you can find the relative script/link into /etc/init.d/ and /etc/rc*.d directories). Slim is a window-manager-independent login manager, so you can launch many different wm with it. That means that the default action is to run the window session named 'default': in my case, none. Slim launchs X which runs a default xterm. To make slim launch awesome you have two choices:

  1. the worst solution: type F11 many time until the word awesome appears, before each login (slim masq)
  2. my solution: insert into your ~/.xsession file something like: 
    #!/bin/sh
# ~/.xsession

# my default window manager down here
/usr/bin/awesome

Configure awesome

RTFM ;) Into the luadoc directory there is a lot of stuff! Debian: /usr/share/doc/awesome/luadoc
The nice thing of awesome is that is completely configurable in lua programming language, which is simple and powerful.
The default config file is /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua. You can override this configuration with your own, placing a copy of it into ~/.config/awesome/ Awesome will check for configuration here before; so if you make some mistakes you can easily go back to the default stable configuration simply deleting/renaming the file into your ~/.confg dir.

Down here some links to start with:

My rc.lua file

Sooner or later, as fast as I understood something more :)