So, I started on KDE, then went to Gnome when KDE stopped working(long story, don't ask). Are there any lightweight window managers that offer a lot of functionality? I'd like to start learning the more technical side of X(as opposed to the "just works" mentality). Preferably something that can be easily themed(I like this brushed steel theme in gnome) and also I'd like something that has some semblance of a "start bar". Suggestions? Some cool feature would be nice too though(transparency, infinitely configurable, etc.)

Maybe http://www.xfce.org/ would be to your liking. I'm a Fluxbox man, which is very lightweight, but not quite as straightforward in terms of installing themes, giving you a starter bar + icons. Is worth a look though. There should be packages available through apt for both xfce and Fluxbox

could you describe in more detail what Fluxbox would entail? I've been looking at fluxbox, blackbox, and icewm. I'm not sure where to start, but I'd like to get into "the innards" of a wm, as opposed to the ease of use of KDE or GNOME

I'd suggest you try icewm with the silverxp theme (http://sourceforge.net/projects/icewmsilverxp/). Looks quite nice and icewm has some good configuration tools, besides that the config files are very easy to figure out.
I find the default config quite boring. Change this in /etc/X11/icewm/preferences: MenuMouseTracking=1

For icons on desktop try the idesk application.

And if you want something really configurable try fvwm . It's fast and damn I have seen very beautiful screenshots of it!

Me, I prefer ratpoison. Maybe try that if you want something different

greetz

One possible option would be wmaker (Window Maker). It looks good (or can be easily made to look good), it's easy to use, light-weight and fast. There aren't really any weak points in wmaker. You can install also fbpanel and use it with wmaker (or actually with any window manger that doesn't have a panel of it's own) if you like the "start button" way of accessing the applications menu. Oh, and of course you need to install the "menu" package that will give you the Debian menu for most window managers that you can install with apt-get.

There are two strong "selling points" that speak for wmaker: the applications that you launch (by right-clicking desktop to open the Debian menu) have each an "appicon" that you can drag to a "dock" in the corner of the desktop and these icons will stick there and you can use them like desktop icons to launch applications. (You can also disable the appicon for any application by right-clicking the application's title bar and selecting "attributes"). The other strong point for wmaker is that it comes with an in-built GUI configuration utility that you can use to customize things like keybindings, menu, fonts, and the way windows behave. However, for tweaking wmaker's outlook and changing the desktop background I've found a similar config application, called wmakerconf (that you need to install seperately) much better.

In addition to wmaker, there are fluxbox and icewm that are both very nice and can be configured with relatively little trouble. And openbox with fbpanel is another good option. Then there are window managers that can be made to look good but are IMO insanely difficult to configure, like afterstep and fvwm.

Personally, I find myself increasingly using window managers like ion and ratpoison (I'm writing this from ion3) because I find their window managing model better than the traditional way that most window managers use. But the keybindings in ion are a bit troublesome to set up and ratpoison is for people who really, really love minimalism.

As the other guys have said, the innards of most windowmanagers is in their config files. The documentation for the various wm's is the best reference point for this kinda thing. All the wm's listed by others include great docs on how to change pretty much everything, and as they'll all run dockapps, you then have literally hundreds of additional apps you can configure too! http://themes.freshmeat.net is a good place for looking over how different wm's can look with different themes. It will all come down to personal taste and how you want things to look + react, and how much you want to get involved with the running of the thing to add a new menu entry

When I ran into this issue I installed them ALL.. HD space wasn't an issue jsut the PC hardware specs. I installed a bunch of various lightweight desktops then selected the one I wanted to try from gdm's menu at login time. I finally picked one I liked and settled on xfce for my purposes. gotta love choice


Brief overviews and screenshots of various window managers can be found here:
http://homepage.mac.com/sao1/fink/wmanagers.html

http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/639/

Windowmaker
Enlightenment
Icewm
Afterstep
Blackbox
TWM
Sawfish
Fvwm
Ion
Pwm
Ratpoison
Xfce
metacity
oroborus
oroborus2
fluxbox

farslayer - glad you've found a wm you like, and yes it's nice to have choice, but you intending on leaving all those installed ?

Guess I could have mentioned I removed the ones I decided not to use..
I just assumed you'd get that part via osmosis

apt-get makes it so easy to install for testing and remove upon completion.

I think I'm gonna try Fluxbox. Does anyone know of any sites that walk through configuration/customization? How about getting fbpanel to start when fluxbox does? Other suggestions?

You really just need to read the FluxBox Docs & FluxBox Wiki.

i'm a fan of xfce. it uses gtk like gnome, so it feels much the same, but much less bloated.

In order to get fbpanel to start with fluxbox, you can add a line like this to ~/.fluxbox/apps:

[startup] {fbpanel}

Fluxbox's man page is well worth reading. If you have already configured your printer, you can print the manpage with this command:

$ man -t fluxbox | lpr

"Please, Mr. Parrot Sir...may I have some more?"
seriously though, I tried restarting fluxbox, and that didn't work. Does anyone have suggestions as to how to get aterm to set up transparently everytime I open it? The code for transparency is
where do I change this? Does anyone have any other suggestions for fluxbox?

Can you launch fbpanel from menu?

I've created .Xresources file to my home directory. It has these lines for aterm:

XTerm*saveLines: 10000
aterm*foreground: white
aterm*background: black
aterm*font: terminus-14
aterm*transparent: true
aterm*transpscrollbar:true
aterm*shading: 60

(With aterm I use fonts that come from the "xfonts-terminus" package.)

BTW, in this forum's sticky thread gunnix has written some useful tips for fluxbox beginners: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...=224547&page=7

EDIT:
You should also find a file named "startup" from ~/.fluxbox directory. This is another place to start applications from when fluxbox starts. I just thought maybe you have problems launching fbpanel even from menu. Then the problem would be in fbpanel's configuration, not in fluxbox's configuration.