I have a dual head system and have trouble with finding a good window manager. (I know there are gnome and kde, but I personally would prefer simpler ones.)

Until Slackware 8 (or 7?), I was using sawfish which was fast, small, extensible, beautiful and giving minimal trouble with Xinerama. But, unfortunately, I cannot correctly run sawfish anymore. I can compile it but menus are not displayed correctly. And for some reason, sawfish was deleted from later versions of slackware.

After that, I was using gnome-panel as my "window manager" after loading metacity (eg, my .xinitrc had 'metacity &' and 'exec gnome-panel' at the end). Metacity is very Xinerama-friendly in displaying windows. But I didn't like the warnings about being unable to find pixmaps (? - don't remember) issued by gnome-panel. (Of course, I don't get those warnings when I use 'gnome-session' as window manager.) And sometimes some gnome-panel applets were erronous; those errors don't occur in proper gnome-sessions, of course.

After trying a few more, I am now with openbox with gkrellm. It is not as good as sawfish or metacity in handling windows under Xinerama, but not so bad either. However, it is not good enough.

So here is my question: Would you recommend good window managers that are small, fast, easy to use (like sawfish and metacity), and work nicely with Xinerama (other than gnome and kde)? Or have anyone succeeded in compiling and running sawfish with Slackware 10?

You should definatley check out fluxbox over at www.fluxbox.org
Im running xinerama with it, and it works great...

What about windowing? When you maximise the window would it span across both screen or just lock to one screen?

If I remember correctly, it will span across both screen.

The latest fluxbox that I use. Don't do that. I can even choose which window the toolbar should sit in. Well it SHOULD be that way. Can't wait for it to mature to 1.0 version.


Am ditching gnome.

Watch out for new screenshots later.

Yes, fluxbox is fantastic! I'm just having a minor problem of failing to place xdvi on the second head automatically (when head2 is empty, without editing .Xdefaults or giving "-geometry" option), which openbox does. So I'm currently with openbox+fbpanel. But I'll try more with fluxbox.

Thanks guys for all your help.
Chirok

or you can try FVWM.
It is good, supports Xinemara. I have not tried it.
it supports configuration to the max.
bye

Try XFce... light, simple but full of features, fast.

And last I checked, supports xinerama just fine.

Yes, I confirm that xfce works fine with xinerama as well. Looks like almost all window manager works alright with xinerama (dual head / twin view - for benefit of people using search). I also tried KDE as well. The latest KDE seems to be pretty responsive (compared to gnome 2.8).

One issue I have with fluxbox is that the fonts is pretty small and bold; therefore lack of sharpness. Any body want to provide a quick tips to change fonts in fluxbox?