window-managers

Every day I love small window managers more and more, actually I starting to think that there is no need for Gnome or KDE, I am using latelly OpenBox and was using fluxbox before.

One of the differences between these light weight Linux window managers and the Desktops like Gnome or KDE is that when you add or install a new program it is not automatically inserted in the menus, so you need to add it manually or may have a program doing it for you.

If you are using OpenBox you need menumaker

Nitrogen is a: "X11 background previewer and setter"

You may use nitrogen to preview and set a wallpaper in Gnome, KDE, fluxbox or openbox, with KDE or Gnome is really simple to use it, just open it in the appropriate directory, the one which contains your pictures, then choose one and make it your wallpaper.

nitrogen /directory/with/pics/

If you like me use Fluxbox may be aware that when you install a new program it is not automatically added to the menu, yes you can always edit it manually and add the new program to fluxbox menu.

There is plenty of information about Gentoo (Thanks God!), I am going to write here a very little how-to install Gentoo, then X, the Nvidia drivers, and Fluxbox, I will not go into details about Gentoo installation as there is enough in the official page.

Just like The light weight Debian we can do the same with Fedora, I will use Fedora 8 and Fluxbox to install a light Desktop Linux.

First start the installation CD, I have chosen the text environment as, this is supposed to be a light installation, I am doing this on VMware with 128 Kbytes of memory assigned.

If we are using Fluxbox because we need it to be lightweight it does not mean we can not have some eye candy on our Desktops.

So if you want a cool terminal, a transparent one starting with your log on, it is real possible, we will need aterm

Install it using your Distro package manager, I am using Debian so:

sudo aptitude install aterm

To start Fluxbox with a wallpaper, you will have to edit some configuration files, and have a image viewer installed on you machine, not all of them works, so consider using one of these two.

Esetroot or feh.

If you are using FluxBox and want to start programs when you log into FluxBox, you will need to edit the file $home/.fluxbox/startup.

As you can see each user will have its own startup script, so each one of them can have their own programs starting at login time.

The startup script may look like this: