On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 02:45:31AM -0500, Nick Cabatoff wrote:
Hi folks,
I've been using xmonad since 0.3 and loving it. Thanks to all who've contributed for their hard work; the WM is so good that you managed to infect me with the Haskell bug just so I could customize it, though I've yet to actually write any original code in it.
Anyway, we finally got our OLPC XO-1s up here in Canada this week and now I'm trying to get xmonad running on it like I've seen in the pictures. This is on debian etch, installed via olpc-update debian-big. After a bit of frustration with ghc6.6, which has worked well for me on Ubuntu feisty and gutsy, I moved my sources.list to unstable and upgraded to 6.8.
I had good experiences building xmonad 0.5 and xmobar on gutsy using cabal-install, so I tried to go that route this time too. I got all the dependancies built, but then when it came to the final link stage I ran out of memory. Added swap, but then it got very slow once ld crept around the 200MB mark (there's 237604k available total according to top, excluding swap) and vmstat showed that the system was spending virtually all of its time waiting. I suppose I could connect a USB hard disk rather than building off SD card, but it was easier to abandon cabal-install and go with the packages Joachim Breitner has announced on this list.
There is an issue with split objects and some versions of binutils -- you're probably observing that. You can either rebuild the libraries with split-objs off or try to upgrade binutils.
I installed the .deb files from ~nomeata and did apt-get install -f to get the missing dependancies. I had to delete some gnome stuff to make it all fit but that won't be missed. Everything works like a charm if I just run startx and put xmonad by itself in my .xinitrc. Very nice work Joachim. However, I'd ideally like to have the same setup as on my desktop, which means xmobar. There, I have in my .xsession:
PIPE=$HOME/.xmonad.log rm -f $PIPE PATH=${PATH}:/sbin mkfifo -m 600 $PIPE [ -p $PIPE ] || exit xmobar & xmonad > $PIPE
xmobar was easy enough to build too. When I run startx however, xmobar launches normally but xmonad quickly dies. Or that's what I thought at first. I tried changing the line to
strace -o /tmp/s -f xmonad > $PIPE
and the strace output file wasn't created. So it seems like the shell running .xinitrc is getting stuck trying to open $PIPE for xmonad's stdout, and never getting around to launching xmonad.
I thought maybe it might be a JFFS2 thing, so I tried changing $PIPE to use an ext3 volume, but that didn't help either. Anyone else have any ideas?
To be honest, I'm not sure I'm really going to be willing to sacrifice any of my precious screen real estate on this machine to xmobar, but I'd like to give it a try before dismissing it.
Rather than using a FIFO to communicate with xmonad, you can use xmobar's PipeReader plugin. Then the much simpler .xinitrc should suffice: xmonad | xmobar Cheers, Spencer Janssen