Chronicles of a tall guy

By not-so-popular demand (:-), I have built some packages for qtile and its dependencies for 11.10. You can now install my branch of qtile via:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:tycho-s/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qtile

Feel free to e-mail me or qtile-dev with any feedback!

Recently, there has been some discussion on qtile-dev about installing the latest and greatest version of qtile. Unfortunately, the install process has historically been a journey into dependency hell, since distributions didn't have the latest versions of some libraries required by qtile. The good news is that this has mostly been fixed (although very few documents anywhere state this), so it's hard to know what to install by hand and what you can use packages for.

To complicate matters more, there are several versions of xpyb floating around, none of which have working build systems! If you knew enough about pkg-config and weren't afraid of manually installing files, you could get everything to work, but it did bar the "normal user" from installing qtile. Hopefully this blog post will clarify a few things.

First, what dependencies do you need to install? Contrary to what the docs say, in 11.10 (and presumably later versions of Ubuntu), you don't need to build your own cairo or xcb. You can simply:

sudo apt-get install xcb-proto libxcb1-dev python-xcbgen
libcairo2-dev

You will have to build three things by hand: xpyb, py2cairo, and qtile itself. The other day I sat down and fixed the build system for xpyb, so you should be able to just:

git clone git://github.com/tych0/xpyb-ng.git
cd xpyb-ng
sudo python setup.py install

After that, you'll need to install py2cairo. The waf based build doesn't appear to detect xpyb correctly, so you'll need to go the autoconf route. Even with autoconf, the build system is slightly broken, so you'll need to be explicit about what directories to look in for xpyb.h. If you used the above build of xpyb, you can:

git clone git://git.cairographics.org/git/py2cairo
cd py2cairo
CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include/python2.7/xpyb ./configure
sudo make install

Then, you can clone your favorite qtile repo and everything should Just Work! If you want to clone my copy of qtile (which includes several bug fixes and enhancements):

git clone https://github.com/tych0/qtile
cd qtile
sudo python setup.py install

If you have any questions or problems, feel free to mail qtile-dev or me directly. I am going to try and package qtile and put it in a PPA, but I doubt I will get to that for another few weeks. This should help anyone who is interested enough to build it in the meantime, though!

Ahoy! At the recommendation of one of my friends, I've recently begun using a tiling window manger. Although he recommended xmonad, I decided to instead to go with a different project, qtile. I got myself a github account, since that is the primary avenue for qtile development. This means you can run the same WM code as I do :-). (I also posted the code for the framework that powers this blog, something I've been meaning to do for a while but have not gotten around to.)

I wrote a widget for displaying the currently playing track from your favorite player which implements MPRIS, and I would be interested in any feedback other qtile users have, so feel free to send me or qtile-dev e-mail if you play with it! The widget can be found in both my fork of qtile and in the main fork. It depends on python-dbus, things like Ubuntu's update-manager do too, so it's probably installed for most users. To use it, you can simply put

widget.Mpris(objname='org.mpris.awesome_mpris_player')

in your qtile config.py. objname should be whatever the name of your MPRIS player is. You can figure out what this is by running dbus-notify and starting your player, and see what name it requests when it issues RequestName. For example, Clementine's is org.mpris.clementine (and is also the default).

Happy hacking!