On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 09:26:42AM +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 08:48:25AM +0100, cl@isbd.net wrote:
Yes, you're not using Slackware! :-)
My experience of most other distributions is that they all play around too much with the standard way of starting X (and thus different WMs) such that it's very difficult to sort things out if you want something that's not the norm.
In which case, you've been very unlucky. I'm running several debian machines that are not running things that are the norm... the "norm" seems to be KDE and Gnome, nieter of which generally get very close to my machines (though, I do generally use gdm as my login manager these days). As soon as I login to X I get ssh-agent wrapped around ion3, no messing, no hard configuration... a simple apt-get install and it was there.
I think Debian is in fact fairly well-behaved in this area too, my comment was somewhat tongue in cheek anyway.
Most/many distributions adjust the startx/xinitrc scripts for their own ends and this often makes it difficult to get 'non standard' WMs to start up correctly.
Untrue.
Well it's certainly been my experience with RedHat (a long time ago) and more recently with SuSe and Ubuntu. They all 'customise' startx/xinitrc at least.
If you're using xdm/kdm/wdm to start X then the same applies to an extent, the very *existence* of kdm and wdm (which replace the perfectly serviceable xdm for KDE and Gnome respectively) just points at the problems of each WM environment doing its own thing.
wdm is actually for window maker, please, if you're going to moan about other login managers, and assign them to other projects, at least pick the right project to assign blame to. gmd is the Gnome login manager.
Oops, sorry, yes true - the Gnome one is gdm isn't it.
All this probably doesn't address your problems though, especially the KDE one. I think you may find the fluxbox problem may be what I'm wibbling on about - non-standard start-up scripts.
Or that the fluxbox package in etch could currently be broken - etch hasn't quite frozen for release yet, and there may still be transistions happening - I haven't investigated (mostly on the basis that I haven't got an etch box to hand, only sarge and unstable).
Personally I've worked my way 'back' from KDE/Gnome, through XFCE and have ended up using only FVWM2, all the others just seem to get in the way to be quite honest.
FVWM2 needs a hell of a lot of configuration to get to anywhere *near* how I work, this is why I use ion3, not having to touch the mouse at all is a *good* thing. tabbed windows are nice. A small text based bar along the bottom of the screen telling me what xmms is currently playing, the load averages on my machine and the date and time is rather useful too. Being able to easily bolt extras in to the window manager via simple lua scripts is handy too.
I like FVWM2 simply because it has a nice straightforward configuration file which one can edit with an ASCII editor and isn't in XML or some other horribly formatted language (XML, a language?). Almost anything one could imagine wanting to do relating to fvmw2 configuration can be done in that one file.
One example, getting Firefox to start up on a given window in a given position can be done in .fvwm2rc, other WMs I have tried to do this have either required third party addons or horrible XML or both.