Hi -

I'm new to the Linux world, just installed SuSE SLES 9.0 on my old POS IBM Aptiva. KDE is the default windows manager.

I just had a few questions. I am a command line guy, but I've been looking around at a lot of cool windows management stuff on sites like lynucs.org and now have a thirst for a cool, light, windows manager with some kewl transparent and translucent terminal windows. I realize most windows maanger and terminal products can be altered to look similar to each other, but I've found a couple candidates I want to try. Can I get some opinions here?

Windows Managers:
Blackbox
Fluxbox
Ice

Terms:
Aterm - heard it has some refresh issues
Eterm - havaen't heard too many bad things about this one

One question - I want to completely abandon the goofy, huge icon look that comes with default KDE/Gnome software. If I get something like Fluxbox, does that run on top of KDE, or as a substitute for KDE? Not sure about the relationship between windows managers vs. desktops.

I know this is long and all over the place, but any opinions would be greatly appreciated!

Fluxbox is a seperate window manager, so it runs in it's own environment and not within or on top of KDE. XFCE on the other hand can let you access KDE services and menus as well as the ones from GNOME.

Thanks for the reply! Ok, so Fluxbox is indeed a seperate window manager, while XFCE is like a plugin or add-on to KDE or Gnome?

xfce is a seperate window manager as well but can start kde or gnome services if you want to. GNOME and KDE apps can optionally appear in the xfce menu.

about terminal, you can try mrxvt, too

As long as you have the right libs installed, you can run any app from any WM. That is, you can run gnome from kde, vice-versa, and both gnome and kde apps from fluxbox etal...

Although I agree that default kde is pretty tacky, I still use it. You can make it look pretty much however you want. I set mine up so the it behaves like fluxbox. Heres a screenie:
http://badcomputer.org/images/desktop.png (warning: huge file!!!)

I have also been happy with fluxbox and Eterm, which is quite lightweight.

Thanks everyone. I've learned more about Linux in the past few days than about windows in... forever. I have installed fluxbox and find it agreeably lightweight, although I've been hearing about Enlightenment and FVWM, and if I have enough space I may install them all.

One last question. I have SuSE right now, and it seems to automagically boot up into a GUI login panel - the GUI gives me all the window manager options I have installed, but I don't see a sinple "Give me the command line and don't start x at all" option. Any thoughts? There's gotta be an init param somewhere that can switch a startx boolean so I can just boot into single-user command line mode....

Thanks again! LinuxQuestions.org rocks and I look forward to learning a lot more...

open the file in /etc/inittab
and u will see runlevel 1 to 6, you will understand when u read it