The install was straightforward enough. Once completed I had to update all the packages with:

# xbps-install -Suv
 
The next thing I had to do was set up the keyboard layout.
To do this I edited /etc/rc.conf; the system configuration file for Void.

#keymap to load, see loadkeys(8)
keymap=ie

Then I had to setup myself as a user:
 
#useradd -m -s /bin/bash -U -G wheel,users,audio,video,cdrom,input eamoc.
 
Finally I installed xorg, a login manager, lxdm  and the i3 window manager.

# xbps-install xorg lxdm i3

However, I hit a showstopper when I decided to set the login manager to launch automatically without first installing a terminal emulator.

 
D'Oh !!!

Doing an ls on /var/service provides a list of available services for runit to start automatically.
The runit way of starting these at boot is to provide a symbolic link like so:
 
#ln -s /etc/sv/lxdm /var/service/lxdm
 
Now every time I rebooted the machine, I was brought straight to the login manager. When I logged in, I had no shell access, so I had to reinstall the OS.

When I finally resinstalled Void, I installed xterm and tmux, along with everything else. Interestingly, there was no termite, or terminator in the void repos.

 #xbps-install xterm tmux zsh xorg lxdm i3
 


I included the z shell here as its my preferred shell, so I had to edit my /etc/passwd file and switch to zsh.

Xorg handles kepmapping separately so when I finally booted into i3 and opened an xterm window I had to configure xorg so that the keyboard layout was set to Irish, by creating a config file like so:

%sudo mkdir /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/
%sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-keyboard.conf
 
 
Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "system keyboard"
 MatchIsKeyboard "on" # Limit these settings to keyboards
 # Keyboard layout - comma-separated list for multiple layouts
 Option "XkbLayout" "ie"
 # Keyboard variant - comma-separated list matching XkbLayout line
  Option "XkbVariant" ",qwerty"
EndSection