About

Durden is a free (3-clause BSD) desktop environment for Arcan, thus it requires a working arcan installation, optionally set-up with compatible launch targets etc. See the Arcan repository and wiki for those details.

For detailed feature and use descriptions, please see the Durden-Web. The individual markdown pages are also accessible in the gh-pages branch of the durden repository.

Authors and Contact

Development is discussed on the IRC channel #arcan on the Freenode network (chat.freenode.org)

2015-2018, Björn Ståhl

Licensing

Durden is Licensed in the 3-clause BSD format that can be found in the licensing file.

The included terminal font, Hack-Bold is (c) Chris Simpkins and licensed under the Apache-2.0 license.

The included UI font, designosaur, is provided free (cc-by 3.0 attribution) by Archy Studio, http://www.archystudio.com

The included fallback font, Emoji-One, is provided free (cc-by 4.0 attribution) by http://emojione.com

Hacking

See the HACKING.md file for information on where/how to extend and modify.

Starting / Configuring

Make sure that arcan is built with support for builtin frameservers for terminal, decode, encode, remoting etc. else those features will be missing. Durden probes for available engine features and enables/disables access to these accordingly. You can simply check for binaries prefixed with afsrv_

distr/durden is a support script that can be run to try and automatically set everything up and start. It also takes care of relaunch/recover if the program terminated abnormally.

If you have a system that uses the XDG_ set of directories, the script will build the directory tree in XDG_DATA_HOME/arcan, otherwise it will use $HOME/.arcan. To help debug issues, you can create a 'logs' folder in that directory and both engine output, Lua crash dumps and frameserver execution will be stored there.

Most configuration should be able to be performed interactively from within the UI itself. Should this fail or you set things up in an unrecoverably broken way, you can shutdown arcan and then use the 'arcan_db' tool to access all configuration options:

 arcan_db show_appl durden
	 arcan_db add_appl_kv durden my_key

Or clear all settings and revert to defaults:

 arcan_db drop_appl durden

Manually

Both arcan and durden are packaged under void linux, thus it should be as easy as going:

sudo xbps-install durden
durden

Install by adding or symlinking the durden subdirectory of the git repository to your home appl folder (/home/myuser/.arcan/appl/durden) or start arcan with an explicit path reference, e.g.

 arcan /home/myuser/path/to/durden/durden

Start arcan with the resource path set to whatever directory subtree you want to be able to access for assets when browsing for images, video etc.

e.g. arcan -p $HOME -b :self durden

There are numerous other ways for setting this up, see the Arcan wiki and manpages for configuration options. If you're "lucky" (linux, normal "no-X" VT, build dependencies fullfilled and KMS/GBM on) the entire process should land in something like:

 git clone https://github.com/letoram/arcan.git
 git clone https://github.com/letoram/durden.git
 cd arcan/external/git; bash ./clone.sh
 cd ../../ ; mkdir build ; cd build
 cmake -DVIDEO_PLATFORM=egl-dri -DSTATIC_SQLITE3=ON -DSTATIC_OPENAL=ON
    -DSTATIC_FREETYPE=ON ../src
 make
 sudo make install
 arcan path/to/durden/durden

Note that this will need to be run suid (which the install does) or as root due to rules the kernel imposes on 'drmMaster'. If suid, the engine will fork out a child and only direct device access will run privileged.

Default meta keys are META1: MENU and META2:RSHIFT, look into keybindings.lua for the currently mapped defaults. If you don't press any of the valid META + key bindings during the first n (20 or so) keypresses, it is assumed that your meta bindings are broken and you will be queried for new ones.

meta1+enter - now you should get a terminal window.

You should also make sure that meta1+g (unless rebound) gives you access to the global menu, and meta1+h gives you access to the target menu. You can view or modify the default keybindings in 'durden/keybindings.lua' or you can bind your own menu paths in global/input/bind/custom. This menu path will also show the currently custom bound keys.

Also try double-tapping meta-2 and you should see the statusbar change color. This indicates that all normal bindings are ignored and input is forwarded raw to the selected window. This is important for clients that need access to keys you have bound to various key combinations, like Xarcan-, QEmu, and so on.

Troubleshooting

There are many moving parts that can go wrong, the display server aspects when it comes to managing GPUs, displays, clients and input devices - as well as client behaviors, the window management policies and the features themselves.

On top of this, there are a number of special cases, like VT switching, crash- recovery, display hot-plug, soft-reset and 'suspend-exec until program return' scenarios that all massage these different subsystems in ways that are hard to test.

If durden itself crashes, the recovery can be so fast that you won't notice, but the notification widget (if enabled) on the HUD will likely provide you with a crash log.

If you suspect a client of behaving badly, you can start it with the environment ARCAN_SHMIF_DEBUG=1 to get a trace of what goes on, and there are multiple tools in the arcan source repository for live-inspecting the state of clients.

You can also ask a client to provide a debug view for you, if it supports that feature, by going to /target/video/advanced/debug_window - calling it multiple times may provide multiple levels of debug output.

Durden also provides some special mechanisms, by going to global/settings/system/debug you can change the debuglevel which enables widgets that give more information, and special debug commands (global/system/debug).

Then there are logging facilities for all the frameservers, durden itself (if run through the launcher script) and .lua snapshots on soft-crashes. These are all enabled by creating a 'logs' directory inside your .arcan folder (on non-xdg systems, that would be $HOME/.arcan) and restart durden.