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Yes, you can. Just pick a window manager and use it. I'm using Fluxbox right now. If you want something a little bigger, then there's always Xfce. There's many WMs out there, try a few!
Are you asking if you can browse the internet without a GUI environment (like kde, gnome, etc)?
Well the answer is yes, sort of.
I believe you can use links, elinks, or lynx. (not sure what the exact spelling is).
This will give a character mode browser without graphics.
Usefull when you can't get X up and running, but difficult to read at times!
Like roy it 69 said you would have to use a terminal browser such are lynx, which are not fun. Im using fluxbox and it is very minimal. You have to have X for GUI. If you dont want all the fancy stuff try fluxbox or similar WM.
I am going to be running Fedora8 as my distro and am going to be using either Fluxbox or xfce. How is the footprint of xfce when compared to flux and even kde and gnome? I know that flux requires around 50megs of ram where as kde is around 400megs+. I don't need anything too fancy and the screenshots for both xfce and flux look promising. Is xfce quick? My question, aside from the aforementioned one, is what wm allows you to do simple things similar to windows such as minimizing a window to the tray, saving files/browsing files, able to run something like open office. Being able to use both buttons of the mouse with right click copying/pasting, etc..
On a separate note, if I wanted to install something like Gimp, do I just download the tarball and execute it as an .exe file in Windows and it'll be installed or is it more complicated than that? (creating desktop shortcuts, etc..)
The easiest way to install a program is using your package manager.
A program like gimp will require some of the libraries used by gnome. Also a program written for kde will require some kde libraries, do don't be surprised if you need to install some gnome or kde packages as dependencies. You could always install kde and xfce4 and choose to use xfce4 as your default window manager.
Thanks for your reply. That does make sense. Suppose I can just always install them via yum. I will probably give both (flux and xfce) a try and see what one I like more. If xfce is not too bad, may go with that one.
I am going to be running Fedora8 as my distro and am going to be using either Fluxbox or xfce. How is the footprint of xfce when compared to flux and even kde and gnome? I know that flux requires around 50megs of ram where as kde is around 400megs+. I don't need anything too fancy and the screenshots for both xfce and flux look promising. Is xfce quick? My question, aside from the aforementioned one, is what wm allows you to do simple things similar to windows such as minimizing a window to the tray, saving files/browsing files, able to run something like open office. Being able to use both buttons of the mouse with right click copying/pasting, etc..
On a separate note, if I wanted to install something like Gimp, do I just download the tarball and execute it as an .exe file in Windows and it'll be installed or is it more complicated than that? (creating desktop shortcuts, etc..)
Thanks
I don't know where you get your numbers from, I run KDE on a machine with 256 mb of ram fine
If you only need one Xwindow program at a time, you don't need a window manager. But that's a bit insane!
Or you can use emacs. But that's even more insane
Distribution: Fedora 7, Fedora 9, Solaris 10, Mac OS X, RHEL5
Posts: 71
Rep:
Yum
Hi!
If you are using Fedora 8, the best you can do is to install programs using yum.
Yum is very useful and resolves all the dependencies.
Just make sure you add at least one repository, for me the best is Livna.
Fluxbox is a good window manager but it just does that. It only lets you manage your windows (maximise,minimise, shade, change desktop etc.). It does not have other required programs like file managers, image viewers etc bundled with it. If you want a integrated desktop environment like KDE, Windows XP etc, go with XFCE.
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