Hello there. I am using slackware 10.1 on my old laptop (dell latitude cpi, 266 mhz, 128 ram, 4 gig hd) i have slack installed and im used kde with kdm and all is well, BUT it is really really slow. i've been reading about Vector linux and it's desktop appears to run faster. is there anyway to get the fluxbox/icewm/xfce4 shown in the screenshots without having to download vector? i will try to post the url to the screenshot page, but i ahve < 5 posts so idk if it will work....

go to vectorlinux DOT com and click on screenshots on the left side of the screen

It can sometimes be tough... Several of these screenshots had Vector logos and likely will be difficult (although not impossible) to get - VectorLinux *is* GPL'd, after all . However, that doesn't mean that you need to keep the drab ugly default themes that Slack provides...

I use Fluxbox on Slack myself.

Start by getting aterm - it supports very nice transparencies. Depending on your theme, Eterm might be nice too. rxvt and xterm are right out.

You will also want the artwiz fonts:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...group_id=95348

Themes! http://www.themes.org

From there, check out what others have done:
http://www.lynucs.org/?fluxbox
Check out the screenshots and read their descriptions to find out what extra addons they have used. rox, fbdesk, and some other widgets can really help out.

Make sure to post a screenshot of your desktop in development!

thanks for your advice, but what should i do to get the actaul desktop? as i remember last time i used fluxbox it was just a window manager with no K/Start menu type thing and there were no desktop shortcuts

You would have to look in the fluxbox documents on the Fluxbox website -- they're quite good.

You are right, no starter button. But you can work on the menu in ~/.fluxbox/menu and define custom key bindings in ~/.fluxbox/keys and so on. As far as I've seen all the window managers you mentioned should be quite customizable. Not to mention fvwm2 that wasn't in your list.

Thanks, now i have yet another question, how do i make icons on the desktop? as im working the desktop is quite empty and im not sure how to go about making it ... dare i say windows-ish

Fluxbox can't do desktop icons. However, because Fluxbox doesn't even try to control desktop icons you can use other programs to manage them for you. I don't do this myself so I can't point you strongly to a specific program, but I have heard that rox and fbdesk are two of the wider-used desktop apps for minimialist window managers. The lynucs link that I posted has examples of tons of Fluxbox desktops and has a listing of what programs were used to get them like that.

idesk is another great tool to display icons that is quite easy to configure.

About the menus, if you've switched from KDE to Fluxbox and still have KDE installed, you can still use KDE apps. To avoid recreating all of my menus from KDE, I put just the apps I use most in Fluxbox's menu and if I need anything else I can start kicker to launch KDE's taskbar to access all of my old KDE menus.