B. Hoffmann:
>
> Must confess I'm still a bit confused as to what exactly a WM does as
> some seem to have themes available for them which I thought was down to
> the DE.
Yes and No. A WM is supposed to, well, manage windows (or give the user
the chance to do it). Typically this includes:
* place windows somewhere on the desktop (may be interactive)
* decorate windows with titlebars, borders, action buttons (minimize,
maximize, close etc.). Of course the window decoration (not the
content!) may be "themed".
* draw a taskbar somewhere on the desktop
* some sort of desktop decoration (background image, icons etc.)
While everything except the first job is purely optional, most WMs do
other things, too. They provide virtual desktops, have some kinde of
"start menu", show time & date etc.
Desktop environments do all this, too, but they try to integrate the
work of several programs. Sometimes this is done in a way that makes
every single program more useful if it is running together with the
other ones. Gnome, for example, has (at least) three important programs
running, which interact with the user:
* Metacity, the WM (Very, very basic. Draws window borders and positions
windows in a widely accepted, but IMO braindead manner.)
* gnome-panel, draws the bars at the top and bottom of the default
desktop and uses other programs (applets) to show something useful
(menu, taskbar, date & time, systray, $younameit).
* nautilus, the file manager, which is also responsible for drawing
desktop icons. (A design decision apparently adopted from Windows, but
Maybe Apple does this, too. Either way, I don't understand it.)
What's so nice about this is that things like Drag'n'Drop from the
(nautilus-managed) desktop to a gnome-panel work. And you can alter the
look and feel in one central place for all (DE-aware) applications.
> Also for example icewm and fvwm seem to be both window managers and
> DE's?
While I am not completely sure about fvwm, as I have never used it,
IceWM is definitely not a DE but a WM. It does have far more features
than a WM strictly needs (themes, start menu, battery, CPU & network
monitor, clock, intelligent window placement, tons of configuration
options) but it does not interact with other programs in any special
way. It is pretty self-contained. And it doesn't care if you start
another program to manage the desktop (icons, background image) or use a
different program to display a taskbar.
By the way, you can use IceWM when running Gnome (replacing Metacity).
If you are searching for a lightweight WM and are not afraid to tweak
text files (only key=value kind of syntax), I can only recommend giving
IceWM a try. I use it since my first days with Linux and still love it.
It's just not as shiny as a Gnome or Xfce4 desktop (but close).
J.
--
Fashion is more important to me than war, famine, disease or art.
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