2 Configuration and install

2.1 Obtaining wmii

Wmii is licensed under the MIT/X Consortium License, which basically means it is free software, and you are free to download it from http://wmii.de free of charge ⁵.

2.2 Configuration and installation

First of all, have a look if there are binary packages of wmii in your distribution. Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo should already have good packages. If you found a trustworthy package, you may now safely skip this section.

For all those who are still reading this, let me tell you that you are on the good side because if you grab the sources and compile them yourself you'll benefit from having everything in it's original place, which will ease your use of wmii.

1. Uninstalling a previous version:

           cd /path/to/wmii-previous
           make uninstall && make clean
   

   In case you're installing a newer version of wmii, this is the first thing you should do otherwise you'll end up mixing binaries, configuration files and manual-pages of different and potentially incompatible versions.

2. Unpack it:

           tar xzf wmii-3.tar.gz
           cd wmii-3
   

3. Edit the configuration:

           vim config.mk
   

   The most important variable to set is the PREFIX, which states, where you want wmii-3 to be installed to. If you are unsure, keep the default, it won't break your system.

4. Run make and make install:

           make && make install
   

5. Setup the X-server to start wmii as your default window manager. You may do that by editing the file ~/.xinitrc.

           #!/bin/sh
           exec wmii
   

Now you are finished. Please note that autoconf tools are not used for various reasons ⁶. Please don't ask the wmii developers to use autoconf, they won't listen to you.