Re: Confused state of my system

[Haines Brown <brownh@hartford-hwp.com>]

> One of my systems is console-only and it's happily functional.

Yes, I sometimes work by logging into the console, and it really works
out fine.

But I'd like to recall the question. I've heard that people have run X
without any desktop manager (no gnome, KDE, ximian, etc.) and relied
instead on a window manager and creating panels on which some useful
applets are placed, such as a desktop switcher, window list, clock,
etc.

I'm migrating from RH8.0 to Debian stable, and so wonder about the
potential for doing this under Debian. Is a desktop manager really
necessary? Can one build a panel without it and run a window manager?
If so, what are the preferred applications?

Haines Brown