As supposed on the DWM customization window key howto, I wanted to change the mod key for my favourite window manager, DWM.

Please look at the update note at the end of this article!

I changed the config.def.h as advised in the tutorial and compiled it following this DWM customization tutorial. But I have got the following error:

kay@localhost:~/download/dwm-5.8.2$make clean install
cleaning dwm build options: CFLAGS = -g -std=c99 -pedantic -Wall -O0 -I. -I/usr/include -I/usr/X11R6/include -DVERSION="5.8.2" -DXINERAMA LDFLAGS = -g -L/usr/lib -lc -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11 -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lXinerama CC = cc CC dwm.c
dwm.c:40:37: error: X11/extensions/Xinerama.h: No such file or directory

The solution for that is quite trivial: install Xinerama

# aptitude install libxinerama-dev

If you get the errors

dwm.c:33:28: error: X11/cursorfont.h: No such file or directory
dwm.c:34:24: error: X11/keysym.h: No such file or directory
dwm.c:35:23: error: X11/Xatom.h: No such file or directory
dwm.c:36:22: error: X11/Xlib.h: No such file or directory
dwm.c:37:24: error: X11/Xproto.h: No such file or directory
dwm.c:38:23: error: X11/Xutil.h: No such file or directory

you need to install libx11-dev including its dependencies (libpthread-stubs0, libpthread-stubs0-dev, libxau-dev, libxcb1-dev, libxdmcp-dev, x11proto-core-dev, x11proto-input-dev, x11proto-kb-dev, xtrans-dev):

aptitude install libx11-dev

Aptitude should resolve the dependencies and install them automaticly. If not, you have to do it the same way as mentioned above. After doing the compilation works fine for me. Additionally I had to add the new dwm to my updates-alternatives. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a quite good solution. But the following works for me:

• edit /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/dwm
• add /usr/local/bin/dwm with some priority to it
• run # update-alternatives –config dwm

Of course you can edit your ~/.xsession file directly to force loading the customized version of dwm, too.

Update: A more appropriate solution in a Debian environment is using checkinstall and dpkg:
# checkinstall -y --pkgname dwm-local --maintainer <your@name> --requires libxinerama-dev,libx11-dev make clean install
# dpkg -i <the_name_of_generated_file.deb>
Checkinstall creates an Debian install package (.deb) from the sources. dpkg installs that and should respect the given dependencies libxinerama-dev and libx11-dev of your new package called dwm-local.

Note: Use instructions at your own risk! See Impressum!