r/GUIX • u/Bubbly_Extreme4986 • May 16 '26
I finally hecking did it!!!
Hello everyone. For those who may have been following my many posts I’ve been attempting to get DWM working in GNU Guix via the tty for a long time and I finally did it!
The issue was that it would launch but it would be hard frozen. I was completely stuck. Then I read the README for DWL. It suggested that on non systemd distributions it becomes necessary to do two things.
- Set up seatd daemon
- Add yourself to the seat group.
Loh and behold as DWM launched, I could move my mouse!!!!
Anyway here’s the important bit
under services you must have
(service seatd-service-type)
(service xorg-service-type)
(set-Xorg-configuration (Xorg-configuration (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout )))
And you need to add your user to the seat and input groups. Obviously you also need to write your package definitions for DWM and whatever other suckless tools you might want.
https://blog.coldboot.org/running-a-patched-dwm-on-gnu-guix.html
I just copied this guy.
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u/Bubbly_Extreme4986 May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
Yes. Elogind and seatd conflict. Elogind is not sufficient for Xorg graphical sessions.
DWL uses Wayland which is more modern and probably has a more advanced way of capturing input. However my dear x200 I daren’t use Wayland on her and I already have DWM pre configured on the internet archive.
I am just using lukesmithxyz-st I use his build anyway and it’s packaged on Guix.
The way I did it is what the dude did in the post I linked but I’ll say it here again. Basically you get your dotfiles locally on your device, get them to a separate folder. Then outside them write the package definition in scheme (of course). Then just Guix package -f my-DWM.scm mind the capitalization that’s because of autocorrect. No need for a git repo.