KWin and LXQt and VirtualBox

This guide describes how to set up KWin and LXQt in Virtualbox using Arch Anywhere.

The basic setup should work with any Computer, Virtualbox is just what I use.

I have tried to install a relative light version with only a small memory footprint. There might be a more elegant solution though. If someone has an idea, please let me know.

Setup VirtualBox

• 2 cores

• 2 GB ram (If you can spare that, 1GB also works, I hav not tested with less)
• Chipset: ICH9
• 3D acceleration on ?
• bi-directional copy and paste
• Display mem 64MB
• Shared folder (this is nice to have, later I will show how to set up the share)

Run Arch Anywhere

Start Arch Anywhere. I have chosen the following setup. Feel free to change.

• no Wifi: network comes from the host-pc of VirtualBox.
• no swap partition (a swap file can be set up later if required, I don't have one)
• Accept virtualbox-guest-additions

Additional apps

• VLC: I have chosen that for video

Install

1. choose LXQT as desktop environment
2. Reboot

After the first boot

1. login as root
2. Create a user in the terminal

useradd -m -G users,wheel,audio archuser

passwd archuser

3. Update the system

sudo pacman -Syu

4. Install Kwin

sudo pacman -S kwin

5. Install Kwin system setting dialog This enables the Kwin setting dialog. You can access the setting by clicking in the upper left menu of a window. There you see more actions and in that menu you see

sudo pacman -S kde-cli-tools

6. Kwin-Gtk compatibility To change the theme of GTK apps in LXQt you need the LXDE appearance app. It has almost no dependencies, so it does not add much.

sudo pacman -S lxappearance In the lxappearance app you can chose the theme the gtk apps use. To see gtk apps with the Kwin Breeze themes add sudo pacman -S breeze-gtk

7. Fine tuning In my installation I had trouble with changing apps using Alt-Tab. Looking into the logs it turned out an app called kglobalaccel5 was not running. I have no idea where this app should be started but adding it to the LXQt auto-start did it for me.

add to LXQt autostart: Menu -> Preferences -> LXQT settings -> Session Settings In tab Autostart add kglobalaccel5 to LXQT Autostart

( If you still have trouble check the Kwin settings in tab Task switcher. The flag current activity has to be set to on )

Install additional software

This is a selection of mostly Qt software that I found useful.

Browser

I have chosen Qupzilla. Serves me well and is relatively light.

sudo pacman -S qupzilla

Alternative:

sudo pacman -S firefox

AUR repository

To use packages from the AUR repository it is very helpful to use a package manager for AUR. Pacman does not cover AUR packages. There are many options but I like trizen the best. It works like pacman with some additional functions for AUR packages.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/trizen.git
cd trizen
makepkg -si

You can basically replace your use of pacman with trizen. Only for some special cases you can still use pacman.

Graphical Editor: howl

Install howl ( gui editor) from AUR repository

trizen -S howl

You don't need to use sudo for trizen, you will be asked for the sudo passwd later

Image viewer: LX-Image

Install lximage package from AUR repository

trizen -S lximage-qt

PDF viewer: qPDFview

trizen -S qpdfview

Disk space checker: QDirStat

trizen -S qdirstat

Terminal: LX Terminal

Many LXQt editions use Qterminal. I like it but some keys are not accessible from programs in the console. So I use LX Terminal which has hardly any dependencies and is a bit smoother in my view.

sudo pacman -S lxterminal

Console Editor Micro

Install Micro from the AUR repository:

trizen -S micro-bin

Alternative: Console Editor: Tilde

Install Tilde (console editor) from AUR repository Tilde is a very user friendly console text editor that uses mostly the same keybindings as graphical apps like Ctrl-C for copy, Ctrl-V for paste and so on and comes with the menu (Alt-f for the file-menu for example)

This package requires the packages fakeroot and pkg_config. Install these packages before you install tilde

trizen -S tilde

When you install Tilde several libraries will be installed during the process as dependencies. Most called ligt3*, etc.

Download the arch-anywhere tool fetchmirrors

trizen -S fetchmirrors

Use this tool to set up the right mirror servers for the Arch repository

fetchmirrors --help for help

trizen PGP Tip

If you face a PGP authentication issue using trizen check this:

Error message during trizen build is: ERROR: One or more PGP signatures could not be verified! :

If you trust the package copy the public KEYID from the error message Then use these commands in the console to add the new key:

gpg --recv-key KEYID
gpg --lsign KEYID

For details how that works read: