Hi everyone!

I finally got some free time, so I am going to try and set up a "perfect" system for my laptops once again=) after having to use windows for a few months(needed it for uni).

I am just looking for your opinions on what GUI/WM + software packages to choose, so I would be grateful if any of you can help me.

I've spent ages setting Fluxbox up last summer and I really liked the result except for two things:
-I did not manage to set up an automounter, so I had to mount everything manually
-Lots of different software required lots of KDE and Gnome libraries, although I really tried keeping as few of them as possible. There was always a program which required some library which was not available, etc. Despite lots of libraries, many programs were not running because something was missing.

I did not really like gnome or KDE3, but the good thing abouth them is that there are hardly ever problems with libraries=) I did not like the idea of GDM at all plus it takes years to load and gnome seems to be running bad without it.

Anyway, it would be great if you can post some advice on building FAST reliable OS on slackware. Just what WM/GUI to use and what software to use with them.

Main requirements: watch films/edit and view images/have a decent file manager.

Cheers.

My favourites to accomplish the task you listed:

Xfce4 desktop environment. I use Thunar most of the times now, because it supports automounting via HAL/DBUS. Then I install the mount plugin from Xfce goodies project, so that I can also mount fstab entries the easy way (for example an external ntfs partition which contains German umlauts which has to be loaded with utf8 locale, HAL AFAIK cannot do out of the box).
Another good choice for file manager - but without automounting - is Xfe.

Films viewing: Depending on your needs MPlayer is very good along with its GUI pendant gmplayer. If you want, you can make MPlayer support nearly everything (x264, matroska, faad2, faac ...) or just basics.

Image viewer: I really like gqview (installed with Slackware) or Ristretto.

For image editing, it depends again. GIMP has everything you need, for basic operations like resize and format conversion I use "convert" from the ImageMagick package. Exif-manipulation with jhead. Panorama creation with hugin (it's rather big one to compile with several dependencies). For batch operations, I confess, I still use IrfanView on top of Wine

For watching films, Xine ships with Slackware and is "good enough", just keep MPlayer as an option.

Editing images - Slackware ships with GIMP; for viewing them, there are a ton, but I like to just use ImageMagick's "display". Again, it ships with Slackware, another alternative is "xv".

Decent file manager - I built PCmanFM from Slackbuilds, but it really boils down to what you want. There's the classic Midnight Commander, PCmanFM, Dolphin, Thunar, EmelFM2, Gentoo...

There are lots of options for lightweight displays, just look around and find what you like. Will second the PCManFM, works with hal+dbus. Also second mplayer and gmplayer for simplicity.

Thanks for the mounter suggestions. will try it as soon as finish downloading 12.2 and install slack=)

How is XFCE compared to flux? I was also looking at iceWM. Has anyone used that?

GIMP is definitely the best for image editing and GQview comes with slack and is good for me=)

But what about music? I used to quite like XMMS, though the plugin for gkrellm never worked=( I did not like the way XMMS2 deals with stuff, but to be honest, my fav was amarok. However, it is very slow and only good with KDE.

Read a bit about XFCE and I think i'll give it a try=))

How much slower is it compared to flux and how long doest it take for it to load? I really miss my 1.5 sec load of fluxbox now=)))

I use Xfce with everything in /etc/xdg/autostart removed. It automounts, has a great file manager (which I don't use; I use the command-line and mc), can be used without the mouse, provides a hotkeyed run dialogue box, supports system tray icons, has perfect Unicode support, displays randomized wallpaper, and only takes about 2 seconds longer to load than a plain window manager would. I set it up so that I have one panel along the bottom of the screen that looks exactly like Icewm's taskbar.

I've used Icewm for over ten years, but it's falling behind (its support for non-English characters isn't as good as Xfce's, for example).

As for audio players, my favorite is "moc" (Music on Console).

I use "mirage" for image viewing, Xine for DVDs and MPlayer/Realplayer for video files.

If you want to keep things light, functional, but still look decent, then fluxbox is the way to go.

1) For automount, make sure you have HAL and dbus installed, then you can add yourself to these groups:
and you can then mount things via a file browser.

For a file browser I recommend rox filer:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...?group_id=7023

2) You should keep at least the base kde libs and several apps, because they are reasonably good, and hard to replace. I wouldn't install too much stuff dependent on GNOME, you will hit dependency hell quickly. But you can and should install gnumeric if you need it.

mplayer to watch movies, gqview to view images, gimp to edit images, rox filer to browse files.

Notes on if you want to use rox filer, I usually install it in my home directory. I use the Archive program for extracting archives, it's written in python and you can easily extend it or modify it to use say 7zip to extract archives. It requires ROX-Lib. I also use videothumbnailer:
http://www.kerofin.demon.co.uk/rox/VideoThumbnail.html
You can also add more formats to it pretty easily by messing with the config files.
Some people don't like rox filer, so if you don't like it look for another light one here:
http://freshmeat.net/browse/860/
And there's always 'mc' if you can't find a good one.

wmaker from git, with taskbar-1.03 and ROX-Filer. I have my own automounter for USB stuff called Xusb-hotmount. I use a program called autostart to manage the CD drive. If an empty CD is insetred it pops up with teh CD burber of my choice. if a data CD is inserted, it mounts it and open a ROX-Filer window there. I f music CD is inserted, it runs the CD player of my choice.

wmaker is one of the few lightweight WM's which comes with its' own GUI preferences program. And there is another one available if you don't like the one that ships. wmaker is elegant, feature-rich, stable and easy on the eyes and nerves. Currently undergoing a heavy round of development...