River Wayland Compositor package for Debian

This repository hosts unofficial binary packages for Debian Bookworm for River, and various related packages stacktile, wlopm, and Zig. The full list of packages can be seen in the Packages file. Note also that river requires wlroots 0.17, so wlroots is backported from experimental.

Source packages for the packages that are not in Debian can be found on salsa.debian.org. These include river, Zig, stacktile, and wlopm.

The instructions below assume your user can obtain root permissions with sudo. Modify as required.

Install key

Add repository

Install River

This will install a build of the current release of river. N.B. There was about 10 months between the release of 0.1.3 and 0.2.0. During this period, prerelease 0.2.0-dev packages were provided under the name of river-head. As of 2023-01-10 these have been removed.

Configure

Edit ~/.config/river/init to customize as desired.
Note that this configuration binds "Super+Shift Enter" to launch the foot terminal emulator. So consider either changing that binding or better still, install foot.

Run

This package installs a /usr/share/wayland-sessions/river.desktop file, so if you are using gdm you should be able to select river when you log in.
However, it is probably a good idea to first test it just by launching river from a terminal. Eg. run:

Problems?

Check the river, riverctl, and rivertile man pages. Further information about using river can be found in the river wiki.

Package or apt problems?

For issues related specifically to the Debian packges you can email the maintainer (hint apt show river) or ask NickH in #river.

If apt complains about an invalid signature. Eg

you may have an old expired repository key. Please repeat the "Install key" procedure above. If you install the nickh-archive-keyring package, you should not need to do this.