Need a good light Window Manager...
 

Hiya,

I recently got myself an old Compaq Presario 1685 laptop (K6 400MHz, 64MB RAM), and have installed Red Hat 7.2 on it.

Everything is working fine on it (all the hardware detected perfectly), but I need to run a GUI on it, so that I can use it for work.. Unfortunately, it runs rather slowly with KDE, and if it runs that slowly, I'd be better off using the crappy terminals I'm currently stuck on *shudder*..

I was hoping that someone could recommend a light (on the resources) but still flexible Windows Manager..

Thanks,
Matty_Cross

This is asked all the time, a search would have given you many results.


XFce, Blackbox, Fluxbox, WindowMaker, Enlightenment and many others...

FluxBox is very light.

try http://www.xwinman.org for a whole list of 'em.

Yea Blackbox or Fluxbox, both are very similar and very light. Easy to configure menus.

Woohoo! Yeah for Flux!

Currently (due to another SIMILAR thread) I am using XFCE, and I must say, very good, but is still no Flux.

Cool

Or, you could use something that is used by default by Gnome... SawFish. So many people don't seem to know that you can use SF on its own! It rocks! Nothing at all that clutters up the screen... no kickers, no panels, no docks, no anythings... only what you explicitely tell it to have on screen!

My First Linux box was a pent.166 non-MMX 16Mb EDO ram Trident TGUI9660 1Mb video card running Vector Linux 1.8 with IceWM as a window manager & it ran wonderfully. I later upgraded my ram to 64Mb (because of Star Office 5.2) & the linux box would run faster than my AMD K6-2 400Mhz 64Mb ram Trident TGUI 9660 1Mb Video Card with Win98SE. I personally like IceWM for an old machine.

Just My $0.02,

Bubba169

I would suggest FluxBox, BlackBox or Icewm is quite nice too :)

Sawfish!!

On a p4, where KDE takes about 15-20 seconds to load, it logs on and off faster than you can type 'root'.it's tough to start certain apps, or open folders without icons and taskbars, so you build the menus yourself (mandrake has all the menus pre-arranged in all included window managers) and you're all set... just middle-click anywhere on the lovely blue background

it --might-- even let you pick wallpaper, i didn't check

uhh, i suppose it would help to mention that the menu config files seem to be in /etc/X11/sawfish

I would suggest fluxbox, because
- fluxbox is lightweight and small
- its faster then kde and gnome
- it is easier to configure, only a couple of config files in ~/.fluxbox
- most importantly the tabbed windows. this feature is very useful when you have many windows open and you want to organise them for easy access.
- fluxbox can run wm and kde applets
- fluxbox gives user more desktop space, as it does not have a bloated taskbar or panels.

Whether it's a slower or a faster machine fluxbox is compelling, actually more compelling then its cousin blackbox. Unfortunately many distros dont include fluxbox...
Thanks,
manas

I suggest Window Maker. It's small and fast and looks good.

window maker is awesome for a light desktop. it is very easy to configure also.

I'd like to thank everyone who replied to this...

I'm going to try out sawfish first (coz I have it), and then FluxBox... I'll choose which one suits my needs best from playing with them..

Thanks for all your help,
Matty_Cross

Yep, it does! Middle-click on the background, select 'Customize' and then 'Workspaces' and select the second sub-menu on the window that pops up. Or, run any program that can output to the root window... Esetroot/bsetroot/bsetbg/qiv/any of the X11 screensavers...