How To Install Bluetile In Ubuntu (Tiling Window Manager For X Based On Xmonad)

Update: you can now install Bluetile in Ubuntu 10.04 from a PPA repository!

Bluetile is a tiling window manager for X based on xmonad. Bluetile automatically arranges the windows to tile the screen, maximizing screen use. I really like Bluetile because you don't have to login to a different session: all you have to do is normally login into your Gnome session and start Bluetile.


Bluetiles features:

• Hybrid approach: Stacking window layout & tiling layouts available
• Maximizing & minimizing windows in all layouts
• All features accessible from mouse, as well as keyboard
• Good multihead support
• Designed to integrate with the GNOME desktop environment

Bluetiles is not very easy to install but that's basically because there is no how-to (or a decent one anyway) for this so I decided to provide a post with full installation instructions - for Ubuntu (I've only tested it in Ubuntu Karmic).

Before we get started, take a look at these screenshots I've just took with Bluetiles:

And a video provided by the Bluetile website:

Screencast - Bluetile from Jan Vornberger on Vimeo.

1. Firstly, let's install everything we need and is available in the repositories.

Open a terminal and paste this:

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall libghc6-network-dev libghc6-parsec-dev libghc6-mtl-dev libghc6-zlib-dev libghc6-glade-dev libghc6-gtk-dev ghc

2. Download and install Gtk2Hs

Download Gtk2Hs from HERE. Or, you can use this command instead for downloading the file:

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gtk2hs/gtk2hs-0.10.1.tar.gz

Then extract the archive and open a terminal, navigate to the folder where you extracted and run the following commands:

./configure
make
sudo checkinstall --fstrans=no --install=yes --pkgname=gtk2hs --pkgversion "0:10.1-12ubuntu3" --default

The last command from above will create a .deb file and install it, so you can easily remove / upgrade Gtk2Hs later on.

3. Download and install Haskell Cabal-Install in Ubuntu

You can download it from HERE or just run this command:

wget http://haskell.org/cabal/release/cabal-install-0.6.2/cabal-install-0.6.2.tar.gz

Then extract it, navigate to the folder where you extracted and run these commands:

./bootstrap.sh

sudo ln -s $HOME/.cabal/bin/cabal /usr/local/bin/cabal

4. Installing Bluetile

Run the following commands in a terminal:

cabal update
cabal install bluetile

Now you may want to close any Avant Window Navigator, Docky or Cairo Dock instances you may have running and finally run Bluetile:

~/.cabal/bin/bluetile

5. Using Bluetile.

Take a look at the keyboard shortcuts available HERE.


Update: you can now install Bluetile in Ubuntu 10.04 from a PPA repository!

Credits for the image in the beginning of the post: Dons00