Can't use my new sowm :(

[steppeno]

I'm trying to restore an old notebook with arch and sowm, installed dmenu and st for default keybinding, added sowm to xinitrc. but upon startx sowm start (i think, black screen with mouse cursor) but no keybinding is taken (dmenu or st)... I need an help

[Unixsys]

Hello @steppeno,

You're right, sowm is starting. I suspect why you're not able to launch programs is that sowm cannot execute them, which could have any number of culprits. Please try these things:

1. In your ~/.xinitrc (or equivalent), try doing this:

exec sowm
# stuffs here
st

That will hopefully give you a terminal. Does it?
2. Make sure when compiling st & dmenu that you ran make install. If so, please show me the output of for i in 'st dmenu'; do which $i; done. Do note that the system call sowm uses to execute programs will disregard your $PATH and instead look in predefined locations (/bin, /usr/bin, etc.) If you moved dmenu_run or st to something like ~/.local/bin, sowm cannot execute it.

Hope this finds you well,
Unixsys

[steppeno]

Thanks @Unixsys for your fast reply,

1. Yes I a have a terminal
2. st and dmenu are installed with pacman and they are in /usr/bin/...
3. Strangely sowm works on main laptop, where i have arch with Gnome. I created a a Gdm session for sowm and keybinding works...

Thanks again
Steppeno

[Unixsys]

Sorry for my delay.

1. Yes I a have a terminal

Amazing! For the time being, you could use that terminal to spawn programs.

2. st and dmenu are installed with pacman and they are in /usr/bin/...

Okay; maybe check the permissions on st & dmenu. Also, doing a quick search on the package list (http://archlinux.org/packages) shows no sign of st. Are you sure that you installed it via pacman?

3. Strangely sowm works on main laptop, where i have arch with Gnome. I created a a Gdm session for sowm and keybinding works...

I'm not very familiar with gdm, nor the interworkings of Gnome. Could you bychance compile st & dmenu from the latest source (git.suckless.org/dmenu & git.suckless.org/st)?

[wijaksanapanji]

I'm trying to restore an old notebook with arch and sowm, installed dmenu and st for default keybinding, added sowm to xinitrc. but upon startx sowm start (i think, black screen with mouse cursor) but no keybinding is taken (dmenu or st)... I need an help

have you resolved this issue?
it's seems that I have the same problem, blank screen with cursor, can't open terminal or tty

[wijaksanapanji]

I'm trying to restore an old notebook with arch and sowm, installed dmenu and st for default keybinding, added sowm to xinitrc. but upon startx sowm start (i think, black screen with mouse cursor) but no keybinding is taken (dmenu or st)... I need an help

have you resolved this issue?
it's seems that I have the same problem, blank screen with cursor, can't open terminal or tty

I was using ubuntu server,
switched to arch, everything works

[Deleted user]

I'm trying to restore an old notebook with arch and sowm, installed dmenu and st for default keybinding, added sowm to xinitrc. but upon startx sowm start (i think, black screen with mouse cursor) but no keybinding is taken (dmenu or st)... I need an help

have you resolved this issue?
it's seems that I have the same problem, blank screen with cursor, can't open terminal or tty

I was using ubuntu server,
switched to arch, everything works

Looks like ubuntu server is misconfigured in some way. Most likely, there is lack of proper locale or sowm is compiled differently (ubuntu devs love to patch everything, including gcc and other sowm dependencies). Or there is just a typo in config.h. Mine looks like this and works like a charm on Arch (Alt+t spawns alacritty).

const char* term[] = {"alacritty", 0};
static struct key keys[] = {
    {MOD, XK_t, run, {.com = term}}
}

[kyoobey]

made a fresh arch install in virtualbox and compiled sowm from source, same issue (black screen with mouse)

i've applied the round corners patch manually, but it didn't compile before aswell

config.h

#ifndef CONFIG_H
#define CONFIG_H

#define MOD Mod4Mask
#define ROUND_CORNERS 20

const char* menu[]    = {"dmenu_run",      0};
const char* term[]    = {"alacritty",      0};

static struct key keys[] = {
    {MOD,      XK_q,   win_kill,   {0}},
    {MOD,      XK_c,   win_center, {0}},
    {MOD,      XK_f,   win_fs,     {0}},

    {Mod1Mask,           XK_Tab, win_next,   {0}},
    {Mod1Mask|ShiftMask, XK_Tab, win_prev,   {0}},

    {MOD, XK_d,      run, {.com = menu}},
    {MOD, XK_Return, run, {.com = term}},

    {MOD,           XK_1, ws_go,     {.i = 1}},
    {MOD|ShiftMask, XK_1, win_to_ws, {.i = 1}},
    {MOD,           XK_2, ws_go,     {.i = 2}},
    {MOD|ShiftMask, XK_2, win_to_ws, {.i = 2}},
    {MOD,           XK_3, ws_go,     {.i = 3}},
    {MOD|ShiftMask, XK_3, win_to_ws, {.i = 3}}
};

#endif

file permission:

/opt/sowm -> whereis alacritty dmenu_run
alacritty: /usr/bin/alacritty /usr/share/man/man1/alacritty.1.gz
dmenu_run: /usr/bin/dmenu_run
/opt/sowm -> ^ls -lh /usr/bin/alacritty /usr/bin/dmenu_run
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6.2M Oct 14 00:28 /usr/bin/alacritty
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   58 Oct  5 19:49 /usr/bin/dmenu_run