Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

In this page you will find solutions to common issues related to installing and using AwesomeWM and/or my dotfiles.

I cannot find the login screen button that lets me login with AwesomeWM

In order for your login screen or, to be more precise, your display manager, to display this button, it needs to find an awesome.desktop file inside /usr/share/xsessions/. When installing AwesomeWM from source, this file is not installed automatically.

You can use this terminal command to create the file:

echo '[Desktop Entry]
Name=awesome
Comment=Highly configurable framework window manager
TryExec=awesome
Exec=awesome
Type=Application
' | sudo tee /usr/share/xsessions/awesome.desktop

How do I debug my configuration?

After you make changes to your awesome configuration, it is possible that you get error notifications and / or your desktop is falling back to the default AwesomeWM config.

Usually it is a silly syntax error like a forgotten , or =. Other times it is more complicated. In order to debug your configuration you need access to the error logs:

• If you are using a Display Manager (which is usually the case for most distros), the logs should be in ~/.xsession-errors by default.

• If you are using xinit + startx, you can simply redirect AwesomeWM's stdout and stderr to a file. So in your ~/.xinitrc replace exec awesome with:

  exec awesome >/tmp/awesomewm-log 2>&1

  And then relog.

In both 2 cases you can then simply run tail -f /path/to/your/logs in a terminal, restart AwesomeWM with super + shift + r and take a look at the terminal output.

---

• Another option that works anywhere but requires you to install an extra package is Xephyr.

  You can run Xephyr + awesome in a terminal like so:

  Xephyr :1 -screen 1366x768 &
  DISPLAY=:1 awesome

  This will start Awesome in a separate window which you can use to reproduce the error and when you are done, look at the output of the terminal you launched Xephyr with.