Installing

Currently, the only way to try Strata is by compiling it using the Rust compiler.

Installing Rust

To build Strata, you need the Rust compiler and Cargo. These maybe available as specific packages in your distro's repository. For instructions to install these on some common distros, see the distro-specific instructions. If your distro is not listed, you can try this.

Distro-specific

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S rust

Fedora

sudo dnf install rust cargo

Debian (based)

sudo apt install rustc cargo

openSUSE

sudo zypper install rust cargo

Void Linux

sudo xbps-install -S rust cargo

Gentoo

sudo emerge dev-lang/rust sys-devel/cargo

Using the rustup script

If you are not on any of the above distros or that method didn't work for you, you can try using the official Rustup script. This script will work on virtually any GNU/Linux distro. To use this script, its recommended that you use curl. You probably already have it installed. If not, you can easily install it using your distro's package manager. Then run this command:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Now just follow the prompts. You should be okay with the defaults.

Installing other dependencies

To compile and run Strata, you need some external dependencies. These are dependencies mostly used by the Smithay library. The required dependencies are:

• udev
• wayland
• wayland-protocols
• libinput
• libxkbcommon
• libglvnd
• seatd
• dbus-glib
• mesa
• make (for compiling and linking)

The package names vary across different distributions. The install instructions for Arch, Fedora and Debian have been given below:

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S udev wayland wayland-protocols libinput libxkbcommon libglvnd seatd dbus-glib mesa make

Fedora

sudo dnf install systemd-devel libgbm-devel libxkbcommon-devel Mesa-libEGL-devel wayland-devel libinput-devel dbus-glib-devel libseat-devel

Debian/Ubuntu/Pop!_OS

sudo apt-get install libudev-dev libgbm-dev libxkbcommon-dev libegl1-mesa-dev libwayland-dev libinput-dev libdbus-1-dev libsystemd-dev libseat-dev make

Installing Strata

Now, to install Strata, you first have to clone the Git repository. For this, using git is recommended. However, you can also just download the Zip archive and extract it.

Why Git?

Since Strata is being constantly updated, you'll often have to download the latest repository and re-compile it. Using git makes this significantly easier than downloading and extracting the Zip archive each time.

To clone the repo, run:

git clone https://github.com/stratawm/strata

Then to install Strata, cd into the cloned repo:

cd strata

and run this command to install it:

sudo make install

If this command finishes without any errors, then Strata has been installed successfully 🎉!

Updating Strata

Strata is being constantly updated. New features are added and bugs are fixed. To update your local installation, follow these steps.

First cd into the directory where you initially clone the repo:

cd strata

Next, you need to configure Git to rebase the branch when pulling. To do this, run:

git config pull.rebase true

Now you can run:

git pull

This will fetch all the latest changes from the remote repo. Finally you can run

sudo make install

to recompile and install Strata with the latest changes.

If you face any issues while installing Strata, checkout out the next page which has solutions for many common issues.