Ion

What is ion?
Homepage: http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/ Ion - An x11 Window manager

Ion is a tiling, tabbed window manager that keeps keyboard users in mind. It is a basic X11 setup with tabbed frames covering the screen. This allows for organization and ease for whatever you're working on.

Ion3 has been discontinued from the official portage repository due to license incompatibilities. Read more about this on the Gentoo Forums

Warning
This may or may not work. One of the following needs to be true:

* keks overlay need to be up to date * you need to manually find the source for ion for the ebuild in mabi's repository * you need to be "lucky" enough for your chosen repository to be out of date enough to not have dumped the ion3 source.

Something that may help is older versions of ion (which were under a different license) that are somewhat hard to find. Some old versions can be found at here

x11-wm/ion is still in the portage tree, just nothing newer (neither ion2 nor ion3), so this guide is how to install ion3.

Installing Ion
So first we need to install layman with subversion. If you install layman 1.1 or above, you need to change "local/portage" to "portage/local" in you mind while reading this article. Now we need to create xml description file of the overlay

In /etc/layman/layman.cfg, you need to tell layman about the overlay:

For paludis it can be something like this:

to fetch and view list of overlays: If you did all right, you will see "keks-overlay" in that list Now we need to add keks-overlay in layman:

Then you need to append the following statements to your /etc/make.conf file: To update in the future you can run: Incidentally eix-sync seems to at the very least pull in the current version of the overlays you have on your machine. No word yet on whether it calls sync as well.

Finally to install ion3 you need to do an Note, that you need to set "deprecated" USE-flag to package dev-lang/lua

If the install fails due to the files not being found you will have to find the tar.gz files for the version somewhere on the internet. One hint is that they should be held in the non-free debian repositories: http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/i/ion3/ http://ftp.gva.es/mirror/debian/pool/non-free/i/ion3/ just download the tar.gz for your version and your ready to go again.

Switching to Ion
In order to switch to your new window manager ion3 we need to edit your ~/.xinitrc file. If you dont have one in your home directory, you can create one, and it will still work when you use startx.