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Log out and in again to work in Xmonad. Initially it will present a black screen with the cursor arrow. Type <Alt>+<Shift>+<P> to get a telnet window. The guided tour in [[http://xmonad.org/documentation.html]] will be helpful to a novice. After experimenting with Xmonad, run update-alternatives again to reset the window manager. After another logout-login cycle of a display manager or another startx, the more familiar desktop environment should be running. Log out and in again to work in Xmonad. Initially it will present a black screen with the cursor arrow. Type <Alt>+<Shift>+<Enter> to open a terminal. The guided tour in [[http://xmonad.org/documentation.html]] will be helpful to a novice. After experimenting with Xmonad, run update-alternatives again to reset the window manager. After another logout-login cycle of a display manager or another startx, the more familiar desktop environment should be running.

Translation(s): English - Italiano


Xmonad is a tiling window manager for the X window system, written in Haskell. It is minimal, stable, very extensible and plays well with desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE.

If you use startx rather than a display manager and have GNOME or KDE installed, add

STARTUP=x-window-manager

to your ~/.xsessionrc.

Until you have learned to use Xmonad, you will want to keep an existing desktop environment available in the system. Xmonad is a possible alternative to Gnome for example. Invoke update-alternatives to have Xmonad take precedence. In this example, openbox is the extant alternative and xmonad is chosen.

peter@dalton:~$ sudo update-alternatives --config x-window-manager
There are 2 choices for the alternative x-window-manager (providing /usr/bin/x-w
indow-manager).

  Selection    Path              Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0            /usr/bin/openbox   90        auto mode
  1            /usr/bin/openbox   90        manual mode
  2            /usr/bin/xmonad    20        manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 2
update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/xmonad to provide /usr/bin/x-window-manager
(x-window-manager) in manual mode.

Log out and in again to work in Xmonad. Initially it will present a black screen with the cursor arrow. Type <Alt>+<Shift>+<Enter> to open a terminal. The guided tour in http://xmonad.org/documentation.html will be helpful to a novice. After experimenting with Xmonad, run update-alternatives again to reset the window manager. After another logout-login cycle of a display manager or another startx, the more familiar desktop environment should be running.

Xmonad in Debian

Xmonad and its community-maintained extension modules (contrib) can be installed via the standard repositories:

# aptitude install xmonad libghc6-xmonad-dev libghc6-xmonad-contrib-dev

The suckless-tools package is also recommended as it provides dmenu, a simple application launcher which integrates nicely with Xmonad.

See also


CategoryDesktopEnvironment