I've sent an email to Joe Wingbermuehle, creator, developer and maintainer of JWM (Joe Window Manager), congratulating and thanking him for his work and to let him know about a bug.

This window manager, after adding few things and cleaning few bugs will be the better X11 window manager out there.

I advice everybody to download the latest snapshot:

http://joewing.net/projects/jwm/snap...wm-726.tar.bz2

Compile it and get amazed of how a clean and tiny code is able to do all what you need in a graphical interface.

It's not necessary to install it, just add the path to the compiled executable on your xinitrc home file.

It doesn't reinvent the wheel like other WMs and Desktop Prosthesis, its taskbar is able to shallow old tiny, and irreplaceable apps like Xbiff or XLoad (in the same way FVWM does).

Opposite to follow the "more is better" today's idiocy, bloating the software to satisfy God and Devil, if some none vital feature could mean complicating the code more than necessary, adding bugs and security issues, Joe removes it. A good signal that it's not his priority being beloved by the crowd. He didn't ignore my mail considering me no trustworthy just because I find annoying to ventilate in some forum how I contribute to the cause. Besides to be a clever developer he's a gentleman. He just answered me and fixed the bug. Period.

All these characteristics are what I think is a well understood KISS philosophy and what I want to see in any software or distribution, developer or maintainer.

Walter

I don't remember posting here, but OpenMOTIF is now LPGL, and also CDE is openosource and developed here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

I think, Slackware, as the most true "UNIX" among Linuxes definitely should include CDE.

Thank you for pointing this project out. The screenshot looks quite nice. I am a long-time FVWM user. It is an extremely stable WM with minimal overhead. Could you explain what I might find more appealing about JWM, please?

I didn't see a virtual desktop display in the screenshot. Is it just tucked away somewhere? I really depend on having virtual desktops (usually a 5x5 grid) for organizing my work.

Thanks again,
-- TTK

The configuration page mentions it defaults to a 1x4 virtual desktop arrangement (which is exactly how my fvwm is configured). (Or do you mean the "virtual desktop" in the classic sense of having a single desktop five times the size of your physical display? I didn't notice anything about that.)

I had the same question - fvwm and I have fused to become one thing and I always wonder what another window manager could have to pull us apart.

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have you tried it? I do.
It has been released as opensource recently with a codebase of 15 years ago: I think it still has a long way to go before most of the problems of porting its components to today's operating systems are ironed out (just a few are usable).
It's still at alpha stage: if you are interested in it, I suggest to follow their mailing list to have an idea of the state of it.

I'm waiting for it to be a little more usable too, because it's the first unix desktop environment I worked on (with a Sun UltraSPARC).

I can't believe nobody mentioned tmux yet.

Thank you! I overlooked that.

Nope, you understood me right the first time.

tmux is indeed awesome. I use it all the time but it and libevent are quick and easy to compile. Slackware doesn't need to include everything out of the box, rather it is better that Pat focuses on providing a decent base which everyone else can build upon.

Some of the suggestions that are expected by new users and take time to compile (e.g. libreoffice) make more sense to be included by default IMHO, rather than large collections of small utilities that only a few people will use actually use.

ponce: I have also tried CDE on Slackware. In the mid-90s I used it (maybe it was called VUE at the time) on HP-UX. Provided rpc.portmap is running, the environment starts correctly and behaves as it used to on HP-UX, dtfile dtpad dtcalc and dtterm being already usable. The main problem is that in order to exit I have to kill the dtsession(1) process. This problem is known to exist also in AIX and Solaris, and is caused by network configuration.
For the rest, you must use the "Create Action" process to configure dtfile to open *.dvi files with xdvi, *.pdf files
with xpdf, *.ps files with gv etc... the default action being to open these files with dtpad. All that is part of
the CDE documentation that can be found on Oracle, HP, IBM or SGI Web sites.

That being said, I don't think CDE should be included in Slackware, except maybe in extra/. It would be better actually to have it as a binary package on slacky.eu or to have a Slackbuild for those who may want to play with it.
However, in order to build CDE, it is necessary to uninstall Lesstif and replace it with the LGPL Motif 2.3.4.
Since Lesstif appears to be unmaintained, it would already be good as a first step to replace Lesstif with Motif
in the next Slackware.

I use to advocate ideas. Technically each software has its advantages.

The better way to know if the jwm virtual desktop behavior fits your needs is trying it. It'll take less than a minute to download and compiling it (the link I included to the snapshot will not work, it was updated). Of course if you ask jwm all fvwm features you're missing my point .

A screenshot:

Attached Thumbnails

 

Maybe because its functionality is so much overlapped with that of "screen", and removing "screen" might not be a good idea.

Yeah but it is soo much better than screen!

Actually, i can't understand why Slackware includes obscurities like Khangman of Kturtle. In Slackware 14.0, the KDE series got crazy compared to 13.37.

What i would like to see is maybe a little updated installer. I would really use some 'Go Back' button sometimes.

Actually, Kturtle is an implementation of the logo language, invented mainly by Seymour Papert. Despite its childish aspect (its first use was as a tool to teach programming to very young children and at that time the turtle was a radio-controlled physical device) the logo language is a fantastic tool to learn structured and constructive programming.

PS I link to a page in French because it's more informative than its English counterpart, but you can find a lot of other references searching the web for "Seymour Papert" and/or "logo language".

Besides that there is no reason to deprive others of what you don't want to use, as already stated in this thread.

Hear, hear. On one hand I like the simplicity of the Slackware installer - and nowadays I can do most of the stuff I need outside of it. But on the other hand when I was "young" :-) and newish to Linux - I think it would have helped if the installer was a bit more friendly. Maybe if it included support for md RAID in the installer - including Lilo config for RAID setups. Maybe even upgrade the installer to cope with UEFI and elilo - now that I think is becoming damn right necessary nowadays.

But then again, I can cope with the way things are - so screw those people who don't know their stuff already :-). Hmm - I can't make up my mind on that one.