Bspwm - failed to connect to socket
 

Hi,

I've been using bspwm for a while and really like it but I upgraded my Ubuntu installation from 16.04 to 18.04 and it started locking up my laptop. Literally the only thing that had any effect at all was holding in the power key until the computer did a hard power off.

So I did a re-install of a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 and that resolved the locking issue.

I then tried to install bspwm but it's not working, it starts but I can't do anything - none of he key bindings work.

I swapped to a different login terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F2) and checked bspwm and sxhkd are both running (yes) and then tried issuing a command through bspc.

I got an error message "Failed to connect to socket". The man page says the default is /tmp/bspwm_0_0-socket and it's kept in the environment variable BSPWM_SOCKET.

/tmp/bspwm_0_0-socket exists but the 'echo $BSPWM_SOCKET' is empty, so I set it BSPWM_SOCKET='/tmp/bspwm_0_0-socket' but that didn't solve the problem.

Any suggestions?

OK - there's a line in the bspwm config file ( .config/bspwm/bspwmrc ) that specifies the monitor. Don't know why the default stopped working but I got it working again by specifying a monitor, in my case "eDP-1" (which you can get from xrandr). New line reads:

bspc monitor eDP-1 -d I II III IV ....

Really simple when you know how but bspwm still has pretty poor documentation at the moment (and I'm not too quick on the uptake).

Hope this helps someone in the future.

Thanks for the update.
As in a lot of things, have a look at the Arch wiki - usually excellent for doco.