Awesome WM, minimalism, and other nerd stuff

A screenshot in time - I've switched to the Awesome Window Manager on my laptop, which is now running Debian Squeeze.

You may laugh at the nerdiness/excessive minimalism of it, but it's such a relief to finally have a system set up the way you like, to have something stripped back to its bare essentials, and to feel you're in control of what is happening when you turn your machine on.

The laptop is under LVM encryption, and once booted, there's not even a login manager, and I'm actually running 'startx' again after all these years. A side-effect of this is that sometimes I realise I don't even *need* to start X, and simply need to ssh to a remote machine and re-attach my Screen session. OK, maybe you're right, it *is* excessively minimalist :)

After many years of using Gnome and other desktop/window managers of that paradigm, It took me a while to convert my way of thinking to a tiled window manager where I rarely use the mouse/touchpad to get around.

Not only that, but a window manager like Awesome means you are in a way 'programming' your desktop as opposed to just setting it up via GUI helpers, adding items to panels and so on. Everything is configured in a Lua file, which has been a nice introduction for me too as I've not used the language before.

A little perseverance has given me a much more enjoyable experience whereby certain apps always open in certain 'tags', certain keyboard shortcuts get things done faster and more elegantly than before, and I have a set of widgets (seen in the screenshot) via the Vicious widget library for Awesome that are exactly how I like them (just pure information, no frills).

The terminal I'm using is urxvt, thanks to my sysadmin colleague who continues to introduce me to things I've not come across before in the world of Linux, and who still runs rings around me in terms of being a minimalist when it comes to configuring a desktop system :)

A side-effect of having completely converted how I use my computer to something that has a lot of config that isn't buried in a horrible xml registry somewhere, is that I have a bunch of configs I don't want to lose now :) For this reason, I've created a 'dotfiles' repo on Github to keep track of them (and also to clone back from if I wipe/accidentally destroy my system.

You are welcome to pick at anything from there if you're looking for how to do something i.e in Awesome (such as the widgets) etc.

The laptop I'm using is still the Asus UL30VT with its glorious 10 hours of battery life, which I've achieved via various performance hacks, largely still the same as what I previous covered when using Crunchbang Statler (which has a Debian Squeeze base anyway).

Next stop: going to switch to tmux from Screen - again, something eskp has introduced me to, which sounds like Screen on stereoids/next gen.

In other nerdy news, this site is now running on a webserver in Paris via Gandi, remotely managed by my Aegir system at Linode in the USA, and is available under IPV6 :)

That's all from me in terms of pointless nerdy blog posts.