I'm using iceWM, and looking over the themes, there is a narrow choice, and was wondering if someone could give me some info about configuring its look and how it acts.

I have the minimum amount of KDE installed since I have 10G paritioned off for the OS, and would like to keep the system to a minimum. Previously I had a problem with the system being slow and unreliable (Like Kopete wouldn't connect and crashed often). I backed up what I needed via email (couldn't write a CD or floppy), and now I want to get IceWM configured.

Any hints/tips/tricks?

Here's the icewm homepage which seems to have some documentation on it. I haven't used icewm in a while (prefer fluxbox now for my light wm needs), but I feel like I had to install a package icepref and/or icemc (or maybe iceme). One of those let me fiddle with all the preference and the other let you configure the menus.

http://puggy.symonds.net/~rajesh/icewm.html

I'll look into it, thanks.

Going a bit off-topic, whats the big thing with Fluxbox? I've used it some, and it seems to me that alot, if not all, the light WM were more or less the same, minus a few things.
Any, whats the diff before IceWM, Fluxbox, Openbox, and any others that are out there? I don't see them, and everyone says the same things about them all, so it seems a bit of a reach to try and figure it all out from post...

IceWm rules, especially if you use Rox to create desktop the icons and as the file manager.

IceWM Tips -
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...dia/IceWM_Tips

"My IceWM settings."
http://www.geocities.com/reverendsky/icewmsettings.txt

A really cool app for IceWM is: its a GUI config tool for all of IceWM's settings.
"IceWM's Control Center"
http://icecc.sourceforge.net/

I guess I enjoyed fluxbox more than icewm because at the time I didn't know how to get the rox-filer to work with icewm and give you desktop icons, but I found a tutorial on how to do it with flux. craigevil above mentions using Rox with icewm, which would be just as good.

The thing I did like about Icewm, to tell the truth was that there was an actual "start" type menu in the lower left that most of the others I've used didn't seem to have.

Now I'm just too lazy to go back and try icewm again since I managed to get flux setup the way I like and themed the way I like. I'm sure if I put in the work, I could make Icewm a fantastic choice as well.... I'm sure if you're an advanced user you'd find some features in each that were nice to have and that you'd miss using something else, but you can basically make any of them what you want them to be...

I'm looking into that stuff on Ice. I appreciate the info. I'm looking it over now, actually.

craigevil, thanks for the info

I have just moved from KDE to IceWM and it looks great to me. I have more or less the same functionalities than KDE but the programmes load much faster.

The only thing I have been unable to set is that frequent applications appear on the menu.

Could anybody help?

~/.icewm/toolbar


That is where you can change the toolbar or AKA freqently used programs.


I used icemc to change the menu items and set icons for them. One thing about flux that i like over ice is that flux will strech the background image to my rez 1280x800 while ice wont.

You can use any wallpaper you want with most wms that I know of. The themes don't really mean much unless you have to have certain buttons or colors on your bars. There are 327 icewm themes on themes.freshmeat.net, how many do you really need?

You can customize most of the terminals for transparency, titles, background pictures, whatever you want, independent of the wm so themes are not that big of a deal.

Choosing between icewm and blackbox/fluxbox can come down to whether you like having the menubar on the bottom. I use them all (and more) on different desktop machines, and have rox-filer running on all of them, and I guess I just like fluxbox the best since I like a clean desktop with no icons and no menubars so I can just have my wallpaper in all its glory. I like to do everything in menus. All of these three are pretty easy to set up. Blackbox is the biggest pain in the a$$ of the three because of the way you have to do the themes. On flux and ice you can just set your wallpaper and define your menus. On blackbox it's easier to just find a theme that's tolerable and throw out the wallpaper and modify it how you want. xfce is a little heavier and there is a lot I don't like about it but I love the way it tabs apps. That is very very nice.

For the reason why there are so many *box wms is that when somebody couldn't get a feature he wanted from the original or he wanted to go in a different direction that the devs didn't want to go they just forked and continued. It's good to use one of these because most of the stuff interchanges.

I would like to find info on windowmaker but the site has been dead for more than a month.

pj I don't know why you didn't get rox to set up the desktop icons like you wanted on ice...it should be the same everywhere but honestly I didn't try it since I like a clean desktop.

P.S. 10G is a huge desktop unless you have a lot of music and doc.

Thanks all. I'm getting used to Ice rather quickly (the underlying logic behind WM is pretty much common sense), and I appreciate everything.

Now to just figure out how to get all the files configured like I'd like them, lol

Speaking of configuring terminal windows, where are the files to configure those? I've got I think 3 terminals installed (why, I think dependencies), and the default one is xterm, and I havn't seen a place to configure it. There any place I can get the default files, and where would one copy those to to make the configurations?

P.S. 10G IS a big desktop, but I'm still learning, and 10G seemed like plenty of space for /. I also have 10G for /home, and then the rest of my HDD (I have Windows on it at about 32G out of 80G), I have to build my own Linux Distro since I havn't found one I really like.

Read the man pages for each terminal, because the command line you use to invoke it is how they're customized. rxvt and especially aterm have tons of options including background color, text color, title bar color, title bar text, scroll bar placement, transparency (aterm), reverse video, etc., etc., etc.

Sounds like you should have more distros installed and less space allocated for each one

I would, but I'm trying to build my own, plus I'd rather just try and follow the KISS principle.