TL;DR : can't get anything of interest to work in Chimera Linux with XFCE4 DE.
Not a problem, but when you don't know and that's fine try to use
ArchWiki and
Gentoo Wiki as reference and both recommend that you install the xorg that should include everything (unless you are willing to use any reduced package and install every bit separately, that's somewhat tedious but it's slim) and after start manually from tty.
oh I have spent quite a lot of time reading the (great btw) Arch Wiki and other sites (eg Stackoverflow, reddit, github, ...) but in the rare occasions that I find information approaching my context and question (most often very basic) I feel more confused after reading than before.
For instance no mention of Xorg in the Gentoo wiki, however one can find this for example :
Emerging
xfce-base/xfce4-meta will pull in the
virtual/notification-daemon dependency. This virtual dependency is designed to insure that Xfce will be provided with a notification-daemon, whatever suitable software the user chooses to fulfill this role.
wott ? Am I supposed to make sense of such statements just to make sure the keyboard and mouse will function in Xfce4 ? Really ?
Why the f*** does the keyboard stop being listened to when going from TTY (where it works just fine) to the DE ? Why should one have to "do something" special for the keyboard to continue working, seriously ?
Another example : I'd like to make sure that the GRUB menu in Chimera Linux either just contains the only distro that at least boots (the 6-13-2, while the 6-13-4 doesn't even boot) or better yet auto selects the right one for me. I initially thought it'd be a matter of editing a text file listing the various possible distros, then after some research found out that it doesn't work this way and went on editing the /etc/default/grub config file, set GRUB_DEFAULT to 1 as suggested, didn't work, set it to "saved" and... doesn't work either, grub stubbornly selects the wrong item by default (btw in fact it's a two-stage menu). Ok...
After that you should think of any Display Manager, and since XFCE don't have an "official" it works fine. In the repo you can find
SDDM and enable after following the official
Chimera Documentation.
I try to use the minimal necessary parameters unless required or my system don't work as it should, so try it as well.
ConsoleKit docs
xsession-errors
yeah I had tried first
gdm as suggested in the Chimera superb documentation, but got a cryptic error message with no indication on what to do about it. I therefore installed sddm, ran
dinitctl start sddm which got me... a mouse pointer (operational, it moves, wow !) on a black screen, and that's it, nothing else. Failure, so need to reboot once again (but at least it shuts down nicely when I briefly press the power button).
In terms of error message, I checked the
.xsession-errors log file, which tells me that :
ck-launch-session is not installled
so what do I do ? I
apk add ck-launch-session of course, right ? Wrong ! "
No such package" I'm being answered. Yet another fail.
If I don't install the full xorg drivers I need to manually on Void that I still use, install "xorg-input-drivers" (I don't know if this package exists on the repos) so my mouse and keyboard can be used on XFCE, but since I don't wanna deal with Chimera right now. I can't really help you further than this.
nope, the
xorg-input-drivers package is not available in the repos. Oh look 'Ma, another fail ^^.
Oh, just had to go thru un
apk upgrade --available again, I already did one yesterday, is this usual ?
Anyway, I'm about to give up with Xfce4 on Chimera, I'll uninstall it and try the Plasma DE instead, though I know there's a 0.01% chance it'll work but I really liked what I saw in the Win11 VM with that distro (in terms of look-and-feel, icons, menus etc..., not done much with it yet).
And once Plasma has failed, I'll uninstall it and try IceWM, very lightweight DE supposedly, and doesn't look bad at all, so we'll see.
