Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 10:16:14PM -0500, Hall Stevenson wrote:
| * D-Man (dsh8290@rit.edu) [010610 20:05]:
| >
| > I like sawfish (formerly called "sawmill") a lot, and it is
| > lightweight. There are some things that sawfish won't do, such as
| > set the background of your display. It doesn't because that is the
| > desktop's job (GNOME or KDE) and not the window manager's job. This
| > design philosophy is one of the reasons it is quite lightweight.
|
| Before we had Gnome and KDE,
On my linux box, the "before" was the console ;-).
| what did you use to set the background, xsetroot ??
On the Solaris systems at school they didn't have CDE my first year.
The default was mwm and xsetroot was used to set the background. I
eventually learned that 'xv' could be used to set an image as the
background. Now they have CDE (in addition to the old stuff), and I
just use the defaults. I don't use a dekstop from those machines very
often -- while I was living on-campus I would use a remote X session
to login to my Linux box (GNOME+Sawfish), then ssh back to the lab
machine to do the work. It was a bit odd, but it worked very well and
gave me just as much comfort as sitting in my room using my linux
desktop. I haven't been to the labs much since I moved back home (its
not very far), but I can't run mwm or fvwm2 anymore for some reason (I
liked to hack my .cshrc so that I get bash run after I login, but I
think I broke the normal X startup stuff ;-)).
| I guess in a strict sense of "window manager", yeah, it shouldn't set
| the root *background*...
That's the idea behind sawfish so that it is lightweight and
cooperates well with the desktop. Some WMs (such as WindowMaker or
Afterstep) don't cooperate well with the desktop because they have
their own background and "dock" (aka "panel"). (To be fair, those
were designed before GNOME/KDE and they work well when the dekstop
isn't present, such as on Solaris systems without CDE)
-D
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