Date: Sunday 11th April
Title: X11 Stuff
Tags: Arch, keyboard, X11

I managed to get the X11 windowing system booted by running "startx" from the console. This is a bit less bare-bones than running just Xorg or Xinit. The system booted into the Awesome window manager, which I had selected when running the Archinstall script.

What are the hotkeys for this thing again?

Mod4 (windows key on my keyboard) + Enter - opens up an alacritty terminal
Mod4 + J/K - move between windows
Mod4 + space - rearrange layout


That's a very high level summary. You can "Man Awesome" for more.

Unfortunately, it quickly transpired that the keyboard had switched to a US style input. Apparently X11 has it's own configuration for keyboard input, separate from the console. Turns out you can reconfigure the keyboard input for the current session by running:

setxkbmap gb

Notice that the UK input is 'gb' rather than 'UK' as it is on the Console. Yay, consistency.

Anyway, you can make this permanent by updating your X11 configuration. There are various places you can configure X11, but I did it by creating a new file: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf with the following contents:

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "system-keyboard"
MatchIsKeyboard "on"
Option "XkbLayout" "gb"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
EndSection


pc105 is the European style of keyboard, with the tall enter key for easy mashing by fat-fingered europeans. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard#Keyboard_layouts]

Now all that remains is to get a decent terminal font going.