# Getting swaywm running on Ubuntu
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/getting-swaywm-running-on-ubuntu/10701
**Category:** Offtopic
**Created:** [May 4, 2018, 1:58pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/getting-swaywm-running-on-ubuntu/10701 "2018-05-04T13:58:20Z")
**Posts on this page:** 9
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@ExpandingMan](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ExpandingMan)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2018, 1:58pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/getting-swaywm-running-on-ubuntu/10701/1 "2018-05-04T13:58:20Z")
@chakravala: I felt I was completely derailing the other thread so I opened this one:
The machine I’m trying it on right now is on Ubuntu 16.04, the one I tried last night was 17.10.
I tried going to TTY0 or TTY1, logging in and typing `sway`. That normally gives some permission error, which I need to fix, but I can do `sudo sway` and that gives me “Can’t open Wayland socket”. Weston 1.9 is installed, I need to check if that version is late enough.
I noticed that the Arch linux wiki said that tit should show up in display managers even though it doesn’t officially support them. I looked in mine and, sure enough, there it was. When I tried to open it from there I just got a (very brief) blank screen and then back to the display manager.
I was lazy and just tried getting sway from the PPA, I may try building the latest mater from source later.
---
### Author:  [@chakravala](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/chakravala)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2018, 2:05pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/getting-swaywm-running-on-ubuntu/10701/2 "2018-05-04T14:05:56Z")
Not sure I can help you with the specifics regarding Ubuntu. Based on these comments,
[https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/5nyygo/how\_do\_you\_install\_sway\_to\_ubuntu/](https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/5nyygo/how_do_you_install_sway_to_ubuntu/)
it looks like it’s not supported on Ubuntu at the moment. If you use Arch Linux, then the installation is just a single command to do, but Ubuntu doesn’t give you the very latest releases of all software immediately.
---
### Author:  [@ExpandingMan](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ExpandingMan)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2018, 2:15pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/getting-swaywm-running-on-ubuntu/10701/3 "2018-05-04T14:15:23Z")
Hm, from those comments I’m imagining that the situation might be better in 18.04 where the Wayland support is much better. I’ve been using Wayland GNOME for a while now, and I’ve been quite happy with it, so my thinking has pretty much been that Wayland is the way of the future and I should try to use it for everything.
Ok, thanks for your help. I’ll keep tinkering and I’ll post here if I get anything working.
---
### Author:  [@ExpandingMan](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ExpandingMan)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2018, 2:24pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/getting-swaywm-running-on-ubuntu/10701/4 "2018-05-04T14:24:02Z")
It works! For some reason it absolutely insists on opening in TTY7, so as long as I had GNOME shutdown it works just fine.
Now to figure out all the configuration stuff.
---
### Author:  [@chakravala](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/chakravala)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2018, 2:35pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/getting-swaywm-running-on-ubuntu/10701/5 "2018-05-04T14:35:04Z")
> [@ExpandingMan](#):
>
> Now to figure out all the configuration stuff.
I recommend [i3: i3 User’s Guide](https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html)
Although, sway might have some minor differences, most of it is the same. Also, the youtube videos help
[ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1I63wGcvU4)
---
### Author:  [@ExpandingMan](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ExpandingMan)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2018, 2:43pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/getting-swaywm-running-on-ubuntu/10701/6 "2018-05-04T14:43:20Z")
Apparently various things such as, rather significantly `gnome-terminal` are just failing to start at all in sway. I suspect this is due to bad Wayland support on this version of the distro. I’ll see if I can get it working on the other machine, for now I’ll just try using i3 on this one.
---
### Author:  [@chakravala](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/chakravala)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2018, 2:45pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/getting-swaywm-running-on-ubuntu/10701/7 "2018-05-04T14:45:10Z")
The terminal I use is `xfce-terminal`, which seems to be working fine.
---
### Author:  [@ExpandingMan](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ExpandingMan)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2018, 4:35pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/getting-swaywm-running-on-ubuntu/10701/8 "2018-05-04T16:35:11Z")
The error I get when trying to open a terminal is, apparently “Error opening terminal: message recipient disconnected from message bus without replying” for every terminal emulator I try to open.
I suspect that this version of Ubuntu is just too damn old and the Wayland support sucks. I’ll just have to update to 18.04, needed to do that soon anyway.
---
### Author:  [@ExpandingMan](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ExpandingMan)
#### Post date: [May 4, 2018, 10:39pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/getting-swaywm-running-on-ubuntu/10701/9 "2018-05-04T22:39:18Z")
Small update: Everything works just beautifully by default with the version of sway that aptitude gets on 17.10 so I’m assuming that will be the case on 18.04 as well. Clearly I was just being silly expecting to be able to open it while GNOME was running, so there never really was a problem here.
Ironically I’m finding sway to be much less buggy than i3. By default i3 has all sorts of strange scaling issues, but I had no such problems in sway.