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+title: StumpWM on Debian Wheezy
+date: 2013-07-20 15:00
+tags: stumpwm, common lisp, debian, wheezy, wsu
+summary: First steps with StumpWM on Debian Wheezy
+---
+
+Everyone that’s ever talked to me about software development knows
+that I am in love with Emacs. Emacs has a wonderful keyboard driven
+interface and is almost infinitely customizable via Emacs Lisp. I’ve
+done a lot of programming in Emacs from my not-so-great laptop
+lately. My laptop has a rather poor 1280x800 resolution and low
+performing integrated graphics chip. Until today, I was running the
+GNOME 3 desktop environment on it. Unlike most people (or perhaps just
+a loud minority), I like GNOME 3. However, I wanted something that was
+both less graphics intensive and more keyboard driven than GNOME
+Shell and Mutter.
+
+Someone on IRC told me about
+[StumpWM](http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/), a window manager written
+entirely in Common Lisp. I had heard of StumpWM before, but back then
+I wasn’t an Emacs user and I’ve never really stuck with any tiling
+window manager that I’ve tried (DWM, Awesome). Now that I know the
+power of a fully programmable environment thanks to Emacs, I decided
+to give StumpWM a try. After some initial pains trying to get it to
+run, I am now using it very happily.
+
+Here is what I had to do to get StumpWM running on Debian Wheezy.
+
+1) Install StumpWM
+
+```sh
+sudo apt-get install stumpwm
+```
+
+2) Create an `.xinitrc` file in my home directory with the following
+ text
+
+```sh
+exec stumpwm
+```
+
+3) Workaround clisp “component not found” errors
+
+I could not get StumpWM to start until I created the following
+symbolic links:
+
+```sh
+ln -s /usr/share/common-lisp/source/stumpwm/stumpwm.asd /usr/share/common-lisp/systems/stumpwm.asd
+ln -s /usr/share/common-lisp/source/cl-ppcre/cl-ppcre.asd /usr/share/common-lisp/systems/cl-ppcre.asd
+```
+
+4) Start the X server
+
+```sh
+startx
+```
+
+I use the GNOME Desktop Manager, so I also created a session file for
+StumpWM in `/usr/share/xsessions/stumpwm.desktop`.
+
+```
+[Desktop Entry]
+Encoding=UTF-8
+Name=StumpWM
+Comment=This session logs you into StumpWM
+Exec=stumpwm
+TryExec=stumpwm
+Icon=
+Type=Application
+```
+
+I hope this brief installation guide can be of use to one of you out
+there in Internet land. Perhaps in the future I will write an article
+about customizing StumpWM with Common Lisp.