Bluetile
Bluetile is a tiling window manager designed to integrate with the GNOME desktop environment. Why choose Bluetile? Because none of the other tiling window managers were built with the thought in mind that time is the most limited resource among the majority of users. It is good if you can configure a software in every respect. It is better if you do not have to.
The Bluetile project is really just another xmonad configuration. A configuration that focuses on making the tiling paradigm easily accessible to users coming from traditional window managers.
You can create pretty much the same effect with a standard xmonad installation, but this project exists to provide an easy installation path with zero configuration and without having to read (as much) background information.
Contents
Installation
1. Install the following packages from the official repositories: ghc cabal-install gtk2hs-buildtools[broken link: replaced by haskell-gtk2hs-buildtools] xmonad-contrib.
2. Update cabal:
# cabal update
3. Install bluetile:
# cabal install bluetile
Running Bluetile
After you have installed Bluetile, test it:
$ ~/.cabal/bin/bluetile
At start-up
If you wish to have bluetile launch automatically after logging in, you must set the correct PATH evironment label and then add bluetile to your start-up applications.
1. Edit ~/.bashrc
and add the following line to the end:
export PATH=~/.cabal/bin:$PATH
2. Next launch gnome-session-properties
:
$ gnome-session-properties
3. You will be presented with a list of your start-up applcations.
Click: "Add" In the name field enter: Bluetile Window Manager In the command field enter: bluetile The comment field is optional.
Thats it, happy tiling!
Another approach
You can also edit ~/.gnomerc
and set the WINDOW_MANAGER
variable with:
export WINDOW_MANAGER=/home/user/.cabal/bin/bluetile
With this, GNOME will automatically use Bluetile instead of Metacity.
Known issues
X11-1.4.6.1
If you see an error that looks like this:
hsc2hs: Graphics/X11/Xlib/Extras.hsc: hGetContents: invalid argument (Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character) cabal: Error: some packages failed to install: X11-1.4.6.1 failed during the building phase. The exception was: ExitFailure 1
Follow this procedure to fix this problem:
# pacman -S libticonv $ cd ~/.cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/X11/1.4.6.1/ $ tar xzf X11-1.4.6.1.tar.gz && cd X11-1.4.6.1/Graphics/X11/Xlib $ <Extras.hsc iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF8 >fix $ mv fix Extras.hsc $ cd ../../../ # cabal install
Once that is finished:
# cabal install bluetile
See also
http://bluetile.org/ - Project home page