wmii

So. I'd been hearing over the past few days about another lightweight window manager called wmii. I'd heard that it was even lighter than Fluxbox (I was skeptical) and pretty much cut out any mouse usage as everything is done by using keyboard shortcuts (I was excited). So, I thought I'd give it a whizz, and, so far so good.

Get it here: http://suckless.org/wmii

I had a little trouble compiling the source, and to be perfectly honest I gave up. I'm not into fixing mistakes, I ended up using apt-get to install. Apart from that, things have been dandy.

So, why's it different? Well, first off its a tiled window manager, which is something that I've never tried before, basically you don't drag the windows about but just let it arrange them all nicely as if they're tiles on a bathroom wall. Which works rather well, you no longer have to do all this yourself when you have four terminals open, it resizes them to all fit on your screen. Its magnificent.

And yes, it is very lightweight. But only because there's virtually no graphics involved, window decoration seems to consist of flat colours. But I don't mind, things zip along nicely.

Another nice little touch is what the wmii crew call the programs menu, you hit ALT+p and a list of all the programs you have installed come up and you just enter the one you want. Which is nice and easy, you need to try it for yourself to really understand, I haven't done it justice with my clumsy explanation :P

So, yeah, wmii is great and light, and I think I'll stick with it for a while, I love the tiling part. Bit hard to configure at the minute, I still haven't grasped it yet...

Get it.

Fluxbox Install Guide

Fluxbox is a lightweight window manager for the Linux operating system, and boy is it nice. It's basically like Gnome or KDE, without all the extra bloat. Here's it what it can look like when you configure it the way you want it:


Check out the project website here.

So, how do you install it?
On Debian and Ubuntu it's nice and easy, simply type these magic words into your terminal:
#apt-get update
#apt-get clean
#apt-get install fluxbox

Do this all as root (thats what the # means).

This will do it all for you. Lovely.

On Ubuntu you need to check whether or not you have the Universe repositories in your /etc/apt/sources.list file, or else this won't work as it won't be able to find the package, and we don't want that now do we?

Note that this way will give you the not-so-bleeding edge version of fluxbox, if you want the still-warm-from-the-oven-freshly-baked new version then you're going to have to compile from source. This is where you Ubuntu dudes start to click the "Back" key on your browsers and look for another easier way of doing it, but I assure you, this is simple. You're going to need to find the latest source tarball, at the time of writing it looks like 1.0.0 is the latest stable version, so lets get that. You can go more recent if you want (you could get the development version, apparently its pretty stable at this stage anyway)

$ wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/fluxbox/fluxbox-1.0.0.tar.gz

You'll need to extract that tarball:

$ tar -xvvf fluxbox-1.0.0.tar.gz

The -xvvf part is just the command line arguments that tell tar to extract the file and be verbose about it.

Now for the fun part, from the extracted directory you just run the configure script:

$ ./configure

Provided that ran through with no errors you can now get to compiling and installing:

$ make
# make install

Notice how the "make install" is run as root? Thats the install step that puts the files into their correct place, so it needs root access to do that.

Fluxbox is now installed! Note, if you had trouble with the configure script and it said something about a missing dependancy, you can do a sneaky little trick and get the dependancies automatically:

# sudo apt-get build-dep fluxbox

Thats kind of a dirty hack, don't tell any of your Slackware mates you did it...

Now, we need to get this running on startup. Change your /etc/X11/default-display-manager file so it is simply:

/usr/bin/fluxbox

Then, if you have the file "xsession" in your home directory, set it to:

exec startfluxbox

If you don't have one, then just make it. As long as its there and looks like that it should work.

On startup you won't get the Gnome login screen, you'll get the little command line one now, after logging in you then need to type the command:

$ startx

And Fluxbox will start, as it is now your default window manager.

One of the marvelous things about this window manager is the fact that there's loads of styles made by various people already, they've all been creative so people like me don't have to...

You can get some at http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/962/. There's a whole lot of stuff on there that you wouldn't ever dream of getting, but then again there's a few gems.

Enjoy your new low-fat window manager!