Recently, I purchased a nice new Lenovo ThinkPad T460s. Naturally, I'm running Ubuntu on it and maintaining my new venture into using the i3 window manager. One problem that I ran into with this was when docking the ThinkPad at work. I wanted to use an external monitor that was plugged into the dock. Since i3 doesn't manage things like this for you, I had to hook into some events that know when the laptop has been docked and undocked and then use xrandr to hook up the external monitor. This is how I managed to make it work. Albeit, with a few bugs...

First, you need to create a script that will handle your xrandr commands. I called this script manage-monitor.sh and I put it inside of /etc/acpi/.

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Lately, a buddy of mine, joshtronic, has been getting back into the Linux world after a short hiatus using OSX. During this process, he has been trying different distributions as well as desktop environments and window managers. We both had a stint using xmonad for a while and we both really enjoyed using it. This time, he decided to try i3wm. This sort of inspired me to try it out myself as well... I figured I would make some notes on some of the things I did to get it in a usable state for myself.

The desktop

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