Well, I've tried a couple distros of Linux, and one thing I'm looking for is a great WM. I have to stare at the screen all day (Comp. Sci. Major) so I don't want something that looks like total hell. I want something that is very simple, but still pleasent and unobtrusive. I need all the screen real-estate I can get, but Ratpoisen and such make me want to gouge my eyes out. FVWM also hurts me. So far as I've seen, BlackBox is nearly perfect, but I was wondering if there were any quicker WMs or ones with special advantages over Blackbox.

Also: on a related note, I'm running Fedora Core 3 (2.92, but it's frozen). I want to add Blackbox to the login manager. How do I do that, exactly?

Thanks a lot, guys.

Look up a WM called Fluxbox. If you like Blackbox, you cant really go wrong with Fluxbox. Its more or less the same thing, but with a few extra features.

On its FAQ it tells you the steps to add it to the login manager. I installed Fluxbox on RedHat 9 and it was quite straight forward to do, so hopefully Fedora should be more or less the same

I haven't tried all of the choices out there, but I would second Fluxbox. It has extra features like an easily-editable menu. With themes you can get something reasonably-good looking without using a lot of system resources. As for screen real estate, the "taskbar" defaults to being very small, and you can auto-hide it for even more space.

fluxbox :

http://www.fluxbox.org

it's like blackbox, only better...

I must also throw in a vote for Fluxbox. I use it, though I don't really know why; Blackbox is almost identical unless you're interested in the added features of Flux. Window tabs are a nice idea, but I've not yet found them to be useful. Try it out and see for yourself; I find that either BB or Flux gives me everything I need in a window manager - no more, no less.

Thanks, guys. One more question, though. What source of resource cost are we talking with using Fluxbox vs. BB?

pekwm.org

window tabs are the best !

http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/

It looks like a lot of people like FluxBox. I'll try it too. There's a version of Amigo Linux that comes with FluxBox. I'll download that version now.

Window Maker is ok. I'll try the new version of WM before I use FluxBox.

You know slackware (which I see you used) comes with fluxbox too.

I don't think the SlackZip version comes with FluxBox though. Thanks for the info.

Don't forget to use xwmconfig to change window managers.

I used Blackbox and really enjoyed it until I tried IceWM and have been a devoted fan of IceWM ever since. I still keep Blackbox available for rare days when I'm feeling just a bit more "minimal" than usual.

IceWM can be as austere as Blackbox; the taskbar is completely customizable; it can disappear or not, as you wish; the configuration files are easy to edit by hand, or you can use various GUI's for the task; there are literally hundreds of themes, many of them actually pleasant ...

And neither Blackbox nor IceWM has ever crashed on me, as far as I know. I can't say the same for Windowmaker, for example. Evolution never would run right for me and was way too fancy to suit me. FVWM I found awkward though it's hugely customizable and many swear by it for that reason. I could never succeed in getting fluxbox installed to try it, though I've always wanted to.

Ice for me.

Have you tried WindowMaker? Get the latest one 0.91. It's really good.

I installed it, but it wouldn't load. I get an error message saying that it cannot initialize some fonts including the WING widget set. I used installpkg to install the tgz file. Is it possible that I need to download the fonts?

If it's just missing some fonts I think I'd try a forced installation with no dependencies and see what happens. But a widget set if I'm not mistaken is part of a tool-kit that supplies things like shapes of buttons, etc., and that might be something Windowmaker can't do without... Even so, can't see that it would hurt to try a forced installation, however you do that with your distribution.

Ok, thanks for the information. I'll ask someone in the Amigo Linux forum for help about forced installations.