Hi. I use fluxbox as my window manager under Ubuntu, and recently I have been hearing a lot about XGL and Compiz. I know Compiz is a window manager, so I can't get the neat effects with fluxbox. I was wondering, however, if Compiz can run stand alone, without having to load a window environment. Is this possible? If so, how would I go about doing this? Thanks.

You run xgl and compiz with gnome or kde.

So there is no ability to run compiz in stand-alone? Are there any other xgl window managers that support this that you know of?

Hi, After posting this I did some more research, and it turns out that you need a 'Desktop Environment', rather than a 'window manager' in order to use it. You can use KDE, Gnome, or XFCE since they are Desktop Environments. You can't use it with fluxbox or other plain window managers.

What is you are using gdm (or kdm i guess) with fluxbox on top of it?

Umm... I was running GDM I think. Fluxbox was then started by GDM. I found xfce to be to my liking until I found ion3...which I love. Of course I don't run compiz anymore, thats for showing off; ion3 is for workin =). I like xfce4 because it doesn't come with all the crap that gnome and kde come installed with. If I did go back to a desktop with compiz, I would likely do xfce again.

I cannot speak explicitly for Compiz, but with Beryl, you can absolutely use it without a 'Desktop Environment'. As a matter of fact, you can happily configure Beryl to behave pretty much like Fluxbox (at least, the features I use of it).

The default setup is not very useful, but it is easy to configure your own keyboard shortcuts. I don't think there is a root menu, but I never use that, anyway. Everything I run is either with keyboard shortcuts or from terminals.

There is also a very beta dock: bdock (for Beryl-Dock).

The shortcut configuration of Beryl is excellent, and with the Beryl-Compiz merge, I can only assume that Compiz has that, as well.

I use this setup myself (~/.xinitrc):

beryl --replace dbus settings &
emerald

I will have to look into that. So you could just run beryl from the get go instead of running xfce then starting beryl? I will have to try that.

That is correct. Further, since my last post, I have confirmed that this is also true with Compiz-Fusion. It _is_ a window manager, and it does have sufficient feature and configuration options to function independently. I do not like the default configuration of Compiz-Fusion as much as I did Beryl, but it I am able to configure it the way I like it.

So you use some sort of dock and right click menu with fusion/beryl? I noticed you mentioned bdock. Do you use that? Thanks.

I use bdock, yes. However, I never use the right-click menu in Fluxbox, so I did not look for a standalone app for that. I simply assign keyboard shortcuts for everything (or run them from a terminal).