Fedora 28 i3wm from scratch
by Porfirio Andrés Páiz Carrasco
Hi folks!
My name is Porfirio A. Páiz, I'm a Fedora Ambassador from Managua,
Nicaragua [0]. I have been using GNU/Linux since 2011, Fedora was my
first ever distribution, I started with Fedora 15 with the brand new
GNOME Shell.
As a Fedora Ambassador I have organized smalls events related to
Fedora [1], taken part as speaker in the local events such as Release
Parties and so on. I also enjoy helping newcomers to install Fedora in
their laptops/desktops in Install Fests or Release Parties, as well as
guiding them on their first steps.
Now I would like to make my first contribution to the Fedora Magazine
on a topic that really taught me a lot about the Fedora environment,
the packages manager `dnf` and its way to install collections of
packages by groups.
I have been doing this since last year on an old Intel Pentium Dual
Core with just 2GB of RAM Desktop.
Basically I do a fresh minimal install of Fedora using the Fedora
Everything netinstall ISO [2]. After it I install a very minimal set
of packages, enough to have a working system capable of running a X
server, a graphical login and desktop manager with a Window Manager
like i3wm [3].
This is very useful for people with very limited computing resources,
people willing to run a minimal set up for their netbooks, or even
people needing to use a Raspberry Pi for basic stuff that requires a
GUI.
I want to write a step by step guide that describes what to do after
the Minimal o Custom Install, how to provide a tethered USB connection
for devices that lacks of a RJ45 port or people without access to a
wired Internet connection, given the minimal install does not provide
WiFi support after the install process due to its minimalist package
selection; and finally what to install.
I have seen previous post on i3wm [4] [5], but all of them assume that
you already have a working system with a Desktop Environment.
Also, I would like to help maintaining a Spin that would ship Fedora
with i3wm, this is popular in other projects [6] and would be useful
for many users running Fedora in a SBC. I have a bare idea on how to
do this with the Fedora kickstarts files.
Please let me know if this fits the Fedora Magazine goals or if I can
help to write a, perhaps, Quick Doc.
Thank you,
Porfirio.
[0] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Porfiriopaiz
[1] https://porfiriopaiz.github.io/site/posts/2017/03/31/this-was-fedora-at-c...
[2] https://alt.fedoraproject.org/
[3] https://github.com/porfiriopaiz/scripts/blob/master/fedora/netinstall/i3w...
[4] https://fedoramagazine.org/getting-started-i3-window-manager/
[5] https://opensource.com/article/18/8/getting-started-i3-window-manager
[6] https://manjaro.org/category/community-editions/i3/