gnome-panel in fluxbox: performance degrades?
 

Hi All,

I'm toying around with fluxbox and like it's speed and simplicity.
However, the gnome-panel is great and I would like to use it in fluxbox. Specifically, I like its system monitor, typing break, gnubiff and clock (which world clock support).

My question is: if I'm running the gnome-panel in fluxbox will this degrade performance, for example, since the gnome-panel needs to load all the gnome related libraries etc.?

One of the main reasons I'm looking into fluxbox is for speed so I don't want to lose that just because of the panel.

Thanks,
Mike.

The perceived "speed" will greatly depend on the amount of
available RAM on your system. You *could* just use gkrellm2
or conky to get the applets you're after.


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks for replying.
Conky and gkrellm either live in their own window or are glued to desktop, are they not?.
These are not panel apps.

No, they're not panel apps ... but then the whole panel concept is kind
of against the fluxbox paradigm.

well, I find the panel immensley useful and am more than happy to sacrifice those 10 pixels at the bottom of the screen to have all the info I need at a glance.

With conky/gkrellm I'll have to minimize windows/keep them transparent to see conky/gkrellm which seems a hassle.

Fluxbox can run GKrellm docked in the slit, as shown in this screenshot (lower right corner). Never messed with Conky.

Fluxbox rocks.

But does gkrellm has a typing break, world clock, desktop switcher etc. which are all in the gnome-panel?

The Fluxbox taskbar has a desktop switcher, as does the default Fluxmenu, and a configurable clock (it's configured with a text string, not with a GUI). You can also change via hotkeys (I use lots of keybindings in Flux).

I run GKrellM in the slit in auto-hide mode, so it takes up no desktop space unless I mouse over it. It contains a clock and passive email notification, and lots of sensors I choose not to use, but no typing break.

(I can't see myself needing the "typing break," so I've never investigated it.)

I guess one reason that I default to Fluxbox is that there is nothing I needed or wanted to do in KDE or Gnome that I can't do lighter faster simpler in Fluxbox.

Choice is great, ain't it?:)

mike I assume you have looked through all of the dockapps and not found anything to your liking?

Thanks all for replying.
grail: haven't found anything suitable in www.dockapps.org
are there other sites?

Not specifically for these type. I just wanted to make sure you had looked. I agree with others that the general idea of fluxbox is the minimalism
which is what dockapps tries to support.

Maybe also have a search through Desktop forum on this site to see if anyone else has some ideas.

Have you tried fbpanel?

Actually, you sound more of a desktop than a window-manager type! You might try Xfce, which seems a bit quicker than Gnome.

Just for the record, gkrellm has a ticker somewhere that sets it as a paneled window. This means that if you put it on one side of your screen then applications shouldn't maximize other it.

In any case, if you truly want to use the gnome panel then use the gnome panel. The performance is in the eye of the beholder, unless you are short on hardware resources. The tool that performs better is the one you know how to use and the one you enjoy using. There's nothing comparable. You will find several panels that can look similar (fbpanel, suxpanel, perlpanel, xfce4-panel, lxpanel...), but they are not gnome panel.

Thanks all for replying.

The gnome-panel comes with a penalty of (as I understand) having to install gnome with all its mega-libraries and dependencies. The upside is that it is currently actively developed, and well supported. The clock with world time is handy and the gnu-biff mail-checker is just great.

Looking at docapps.org most of the apps seem to be from 2004 or earlier. Is there still any activity/support with docapps?.

Dockapps seems pretty lifeless. I have checked it serveral times over the past three years or so and nothing seems to have changed.

Frankly, I never found anything there that I wanted to use.

Gkrellm is not a dockapp, I'm just running it docked with FLuxbox's -w switch.

My guess is that as computers got brawnier and desktop environments such as KDE and Gnome replaced window managers for a (I suspect) large majority of users, a lot of the steam went out of dockapp development.

As I said above, that's the price you pay for having gnome-panel. You have to measure if it's worth the pain for you to run gnome-panel outside gnome. Sure it's heavier than the rest of standalone panels, but all the features you like and need are not made of thin air, they do require things like nautilus, gnome-vfs and the evolution data server backend. Any other panel would be equally heavy if you hook all these components into it, wouldn't it?

From my point of view, dockapps are not developed except for occasional bugfixes for the simple reason that they are small pieces that weight only a few KB, they were made for a purpose and they fulfil that purpose and no other. There's no need to "maintain" them. They are complete, finished and don't need extra attention.

My question will have to be: if it does its job, what difference
does it make whether it was written in 2004 or 2010? My binary-clock
dockapp works just as well today as it did in 2003, so does biff.

If you anticipate serious change to the X or dock-app API in
the very near future it's OK to be concerned about active development,
if you don't your point is moot.


Cheers,
Tink

I am sorry if I was unclear. I was agreeing with the OP's statement that dockapps dot org does not seem to have anything recent there and noodling a little as to why the steam seems to have leaked out of the effort.

I regret that it came across as a complaint.