Xorg

On top of Wayland, Chimera supports Xorg. Note that Wayland is recommended by the distribution for most users.

Xorg is in the contrib repo. Therefore, enable the repository first if it is not already.

Then you can add the necessary package:

# apk add xserver-xorg

This will install a setup that is enough for most users. Other components of the X11 stack are available through other packages, however. This full metapackage installs most apps.

You can also install a way smaller, but functional installation and add the apps you need yourself. To do that, use:

# apk add xserver-xorg-minimal

Starting a WM/DE

Most people will want to use a display manager, such as GDM. You can find instructions for GDM on the GNOME page.

Other people will prefer to use the startx tool. To use that, you need to create the .xinitrc file in either ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/.xinitrc (this will typically be ${HOME}/.config/.xinitrc) or in ${HOME}/.xinitrc.

Put your startup commands in there, and run startx.

Privileged Xorg

By default, Chimera Xorg is unprivileged, and uses libseat to be able to negotiate permissions for the display device (which means you need something like elogind or seatd set up for it to work). There are cases when you may want to use the legacy method using a setuid wrapper, e.g. when using GDM without Wayland and the rootless path causes VT switches to fail.

To set that up, you can do the following:

# echo needs_root_rights = yes > /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config

Once done, Xorg will no longer use libseat at all and will have greater privileges through setuid. Note that doing this is not recommended.