i3 Window Manager Desktop Environment

[n3rDy]

I would like to use i3 for daily use, but I am having a tough time getting it to a useful state. Others may also be having issues, so I thought I would start this thread for i3 specific questions.

I have downloaded ayufan's PineBook i3 image and put in on a SD card. It boots fine into i3 and I can get to the command line ok. First off I need internet access and can't figure out how to connect it to my access point. I realize this is Ubuntu 16.04 so it is systemd and that may be throwing me for a loop as the normal /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file doesn't exist. From what I have read online I could download network-manager, but I don't have internet access yet to download anything.

Is there a way to connect the current i3 image to WiFi? If so, how?

[xalius]

I would use either nmtui  which is a network manager interface for the console, or just install the gnome network manager applet, but that has a lot of packages for dependencies. As for configuring, setting up and using i3wm there is a nice video series here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1I63wGc...sU7ZmkGzcf

And of course the pretty good i3 documentation:

http://i3wm.org/docs/

[n3rDy]

I would use either nmtui  which is a network manager interface for the console, or just install the gnome network manager applet, but that has a lot of packages for dependencies. As for configuring, setting up and using i3wm there is a nice video series here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1I63wGc...sU7ZmkGzcf

And of course the pretty good i3 documentation:

http://i3wm.org/docs/

Thank you xalius, nmtui  was the answer. It is built in to the PineBook image and works great, not sure why I didn't think of that.

I had watched the videos on i3wm.org , but those youtube ones are much more detailed.

I have installed i3 to the emmc and wireless is working fine. Now for some tweaking . . . FireFox is much slower than it was in Mate which is surprising, so I will be going thru that guide I saw here the other day and see if I can make it a little zippier. Next up will be to see if I can make the "No Battery" indicator actually work, I am sure that will take some manpage reading.

[xalius]

Firefox gets really fast with Luke's tweaks and if you move the disk-cache to a tmpfs ram-drive. Any access to eMMC or sdcard slow it down a lot, less so on eMMC, but still noticable...

[n3rDy]

Indeed Luke's FireFox tweaks were worth doing.

Now I am working on getting the battery information in the bottom right i3 status bar. I have managed to get it to no longer show "No Battery", as you can see in the screen caps below, it will show white when it is plugged in and red when it running off battery. What I am having difficulty getting is battery percentage or run time. It will either show 0 or if change to the format line that is commented out in the /etc/i3status.conf file it will show the current system time in the battery area (not time left in the battery or time till full charge).

I have tried changing it from "battery 0" to "battery 1" as well as verified the path is correct. I looked at the contents of uevent and it looks like similar info to another Linux laptop that I have access to.

Is there some sort of a power management program that is a dependency for this work?

Any other ideas for me to try to get the battery percentage and remaining time to work?

Thanks in advance.

[xalius]

If you head over to #i3 on freenode they can probably help you extend i3status or make a custom script to feed it the correct info. For the Pinebook some other things like SoC temperature would be interesting (basically info from pine64_health.sh)...

[k_mp]

Indeed Luke's FireFox tweaks were worth doing.

Now I am working on getting the battery information in the bottom right i3 status bar. I have managed to get it to no longer show "No Battery", as you can see in the screen caps below, it will show white when it is plugged in and red when it running off battery. What I am having difficulty getting is battery percentage or run time. It will either show 0 or if change to the format line that is commented out in the /etc/i3status.conf file it will show the current system time in the battery area (not time left in the battery or time till full charge).

I have tried changing it from "battery 0" to "battery 1" as well as verified the path is correct. I looked at the contents of uevent and it looks like similar info to another Linux laptop that I have access to.

Is there some sort of a power management program that is a dependency  for this work?

Any other ideas for me to try to get the battery percentage and remaining time to work?

Thanks in advance.

Sorry to bring the old topic up. In case you have not found a solution yet, have a look at my custom script that adds the battery status properly to i3status:
https://github.com/kasramp/PinebookScrip...3status.sh
Feel free to ask questions.

[n3rDy]

That's great k_mp, thanks for the hard work on this. I haven't been able to spend any time working on this lately, so I am currently using Mate. I would really like to use the PB as my daily driver with i3, the next challenge would be standby when the lid is closed.

Where should this shell script be located once I download it? Once I run the script, will it always run? Or does it need to be called on startup or as a cron job?

[daid]

I'm using AwesomeWM instead of i3, but the problems are sort of the same. I've archived my custom configuration for awesomewm at https://github.com/daid/awesome-pinebook

It contains key bindings for stuff like suspend and screen brightness. Maybe it's useful for i3 configuration as well?

[k_mp]

That's great k_mp, thanks for the hard work on this. I haven't been able to spend any time working on this lately, so I am currently using Mate. I would really like to use the PB as my daily driver with i3, the next challenge would be standby when the lid is closed.

Where should this shell script be located once I download it? Once I run the script, will it always run? Or does it need to be called on startup or as a cron job?

No worries n3rDy. You just need to download the script and copy it to ~/.config/i3. Then edit your i3 config file, which is also located at ~/.config/i3 and add the script path and name in front of status_command under bar { section. You can refer to this sample configuration as well: https://github.com/kasramp/PinebookScrip.../i3/config
Once you have done with the changes, just save it and then press Mod + Shift + r, you should be able to see the battery status in the left side in a second or two.
To get rid of the non-functional battery status of i3, edit the file at /etc/i3status.conf and comment order += "battery 0" line.
And yes the script is running automatically and doesn't require any cron job.

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I'm using AwesomeWM instead of i3, but the problems are sort of the same. I've archived my custom configuration for awesomewm at https://github.com/daid/awesome-pinebook

It contains key bindings for stuff like suspend and screen brightness. Maybe it's useful for i3 configuration as well?

Awesome work daid, thanks for sharing