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Hello everyone, thank you for all your support in the past. I have forgotten about Linux for the past few months as school has taken all of my time, but I am ready to come back, delete my old install (I think it is messed up) and start over again with Linux. I have downloaded Slackware 9.0 and purchased another hard drive and I think I am all set. I have two quick questions to run by you as I go through and install again. I will put them in separate posts since they are not related.
As I mentioned, I will be using Slack 9.0 as my distro. I am now trying to decide which Window Manager/Desktop Environment to use. From what I have heard here, and my own personal experience, I would like to stay away from KDE if possible. Even if what people here have said about it being bloated is wrong, it is too windows-ish for me. I have tried XFCE in the past when I was running a very slow processor, but it didn't have much functionality. I have heard good things about Fluxbox, and I was planning on trying that out. I have two questions for people using this or that have used it in the past.
1. I know that under KDE, if you try to run a program that requires root access, it will prompt you for a password and then run the command as root. When I was using XFCE, this required you to run the command in a shell or restart X as root. It seems to me that this option to run commands as root within a WM/DE is almost necessary to do everyday tasks (unless you are doing everything important from the shell). I was wondering if Fluxbox has this option. If not, how do those with Fluxbox get around this?
2. Before I get reprimanded by those gurus at this board, let me make sure that you understand that I know that this topic has been addressed a thousand times before and this is not the main purpose of making this post. However, for those who are already responding to this post or have some free time, let me know... What WM/DE do you use and why? Why or why not would you recommend it to me? Would you talk me into or talk to out of using Fluxbox?
As long as you compile fluxbox with KDE support you will have no trouble running any applications that require root privelages. If the app is KDE based and requires root privelages, fluxbox will recognize this and prompt you for the root password. Its acutally much easier then one would think.
On a personal note, I use fluxbox as well. I was sick of KDE and GNOME sucking up all my resources. Fluxbox is great for minimazing desktop resource usage.
FYI the new 0.9.3 development release seems a lot more stable than 0.9.2 (that almost put me off Fluxy!) and has many great features like layers, working remembering, tabs within the titlebar, alpha transparancy and much more
KDE doesnt run too badly, sometimes the colourful cartoony style and few extra features make it faster to get stuff done in.
You can always (well unless you need to be in the wheel group) try su - and log in as root in a console and then try the command.
OK. When you say compile Fluxbox with KDE support, is this something that you are told about or is it an option you have to find and set when compiling?
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