Display Backlight Control in the Sway
This is just a quick reference for anyone setting up Sway on a laptop. By default the brightness control function keys do not work. To get them functioning, there are a couple of not-so-obvious steps required.
Linux
Building a skarnet.org s6 Init System
Per skarnet.org/software/ s6 is “skarnet.org’s small and secure supervision software suite. Comes with an ultra-fast init replacement, process management tools, an asynchronous locking library, and more.” After a little bit of reading and a lot of tinkering, I was able to assemble an s6 based system and learned a lot about linux userspace initialization in the process.
Using a Chroot
A chroot is an operation that changes the apparent root directory for the current process and its children. It effectively isolates the current process and its children from anything outside of the new root directory. This can be useful for running or building software in a clean environment with only the required dependencies. The resulting environment is called a chroot jail.
Building and Installing the Sway Wayland Window Manager on Debian 10 Buster
Wayland isn’t mainstream quite yet, but if you want to experiment with it and you prefer tiling window managers, then Sway is the way to go. However, building it on Debian requires a little work.
Gentoo Install
My first Gentoo install.