Hello everyone

I own a laptop that has a widescreen, meaning I will be looking at 1280 by 768 pixels resolution.

Does a window manager that uses a lot of memory (read: With lots of eye candy) take a toll on battery life?

If so, I would be grateful if someone could suggest a real good Window Manager, that is easily configurable and _VERY_ light weight.

I am comfortable with the command line, and use the GUI only for browsing, and some minimal graphic packages (like GIMP and OpenOffice)

Basically I am looking to have a window manager to help increase my battery life.

Thank you very much

Regards
Hari

Basically, anything that increases processor use is going to affect battery life, so yes more eye candy will have some effect on battery life although I suspect it isn't all that much.

The best lightweight WM (in my personal opinion) is Fluxbox. But like anything else, what's best for me may not be best for you. Try out a few and decide what suits you.

One effective way to extend battery life is to turn off/disable any hardware you aren't actually using. If you aren't using the cdrom at the moment, remove it if it's removeable, disable it otherwise. Same with modems, wifi cards, etc... Whatever you don't actually need at the moment, turn it off. Reducing screen brightness helps.

The battery has always been the weak point on notebooks. Perhaps adding an additional external high capacity battery would be useful if you're having problems. They aren't all that expensive these days compared to internal packs and can potentially add up to five hours of useful power.

yup, the best ones would be fluxbox (middle), blackbox (less features, but my favorite), and XFCE (has more eye candy, and can be the middle 'tween say kde and Flux).

or .......... you could just xinit directly from the console

and if your going to be daring, tey twm or whichever one it is with teh green backround, three consoles, and a clock (LOL)

hope it helps,

slackwarebilly

here has good list of WM + the comparison between WMs

http://xwinman.org/others.php

wmi or wmii. my favorite because you control everything via keyboard, like ion3, but at the same time, you can use the mouse for odd shaped windows like gaim or gimp, that don't scale to full screen very well. its a great way to not have to use the trackpad. the learning curve is relatively shallow too.

Yeah, I like wmii, too... fast and lightweight. Two more great little WMs are pekwm, and openbox.

ion is good, but at last check, it had no GUI configure.

fvwm is probably the most configurable, but has a rather complexish config file.

both are light on resources, but i say go with a *box wm if you want easy GUI config instead of hand editing config files.