Setting up BSPWM on Fedora Workstation

A guide for setting up a working instance of my BSPWM configuration on a clean install of Fedora Workstation. Note: I have only tested this on version 43 and above on x86 platforms.

Install Required Packages

We need to first install all packages that are required by BSPWM and are referenced in my BSPWM configuration. Most packages can be installed via the dnf package manger:

sudo dnf upgrade && sudo dnf install xorg-x11-server-Xorg polybar dunst sxhkd bspwm picom feh flameshot redshift xrandr udiskie alacritty pavucontrol brightnessctl xbindkeys

Note: The only packages that are required for BSPWM to function are:

• bspwm
• sxhkd
• xrandr
• X11-server

My polybar configuration will also use a few different scripts that will require API keys stored in a Dropbox folder. Installing and logging into the default Dropbox client is required for some polybar modules to work. In order to install dropbox, you must first download the appropriate rpm package from the Dropbox website & then install with:

sudo dnf install ~/Downloads/DROPBOX-VERSION.rpm

Finally, BSPWM works a lot better with an application launcher of some sort. My configuration is set up to use a custom build of dmenu that will need to be installed. To install we will need to clone the repo via either HTTPS or SSH and then build the application.

cd ~/Documents; git clone git@github.com:makccr/suckless; cd suckless
# or
cd ~/Documents; git clone https://github.com/makccr/suckless.git; cd suckless

Once the repository is cloned, there is an install script located in the root folder, which needs to be run, however in order to build dmenu some X11 development headers to be installed on the system in question:

sudo dnf install libX11-devel libXinerama-devel libXft-devel

./install.sh

Note: It is not necessary to install a custom iteration of demnu. Some amount of time and effort could be saved by simply downloading and installing the dmenu packages in dnf package manger:

sudo dnf install dmenu

Install Configuration Files & Fonts

First use git to clone my dot files repository and create symbolic links for my config and script directories.

cd ~/Documents; git clone git@github.com:makccr/dot; cd
# or
cd ~/Documents; git clone https://github.com/makccr/dot.git; cd

There is a setup script in the .scripts/ folder of this repository as well. It should be noted however, that on a clean install of Fedora Workstation the ~/.config folder will be populated. It is necessary to move these default configuration files somewhere before running the install script.

mv ~/.config ~/Documents/

At this point we can now run the setup.sh script, which will create symbolic links from the ~/Documents/dot directory to the respective locations for all configs. Important: This script must be run from the users home directory (~/).

./~/Documents/dot/.scripts/setup.sh

At this point we can now add the default Fedora configs back into the ~/.config folder:

mv ~/Documents/.config/{*,.*} ~/.config

Lastly we need to install some fonts that polybar will be looking for in it's configuration. The easiest way to do this would be to simply install two font packages from dnf.

sudo dnf install julietaula-montserrat-fonts nerd-fonts-hack

However, this is also a good opportunity to go ahead an install my full collection of fonts:

git clone git@github.com:makccr/fonts; cd fonts; sudo cp -r makc-fonts/ /usr/share/fonts/

Testing

One of the few issues I have run into, is the bspwm.desktop file not being created and put into /usr/share/xessions. This will result in a situation where BSPWM can not be launched from the default login manger. In order to fix this we simply need to create a bspwm.desktop file in /usr/share/xsessions.

Note: Ensuring that xorg-x11-server-Xorg and bspwm packages are installed should prevent this problem from ever taking place, but it's still helpful to know how to fix the issue.

sudo nano /usr/share/xsessions/bspwm.desktop

Add the following text to the .dekstop file and save changes.

[Desktop Entry]
Name=BSPWM
Comment=Binary Space Partitioning Window Manager
Exec=/usr/bin/bspwm
Type=Application