Have you tried #! with DE other than Xfce or Openbox? (Page 1 of 3)

I wanted to give e17 a chance when I've got the time to and feel certain enough I won't mess my Arch by trying it. I really like the idea of having a right click menu AND compiz like effects AND tweakable DE. Also TilingWM's seem interesting, but I'm gonna try e17 first.

Many people might not realize this, but #! (either Statler or 9.04) already comes with an alternative window manager, and a damned good one at that......  DWM.

Personally, if I wanted to install multiple WMs for comparison, I wouldn't start with Statler but with a minimal Debian netinstall or GRML (or Arch or Gentoo, if apt isn't a requirement). Reason being I'd want to avoid stuff like GDM (prefer plain startX/xinitrc), network manager (prefer wicd-curses) ...etc.

Tried a few WMs with Debian. Openbox (obviously) with configs imported from my #! install, FluxBox, PekWM, ScrotWM, Musca, Ratpoison, DWM, Xmonad, wmii have all performed admirably. Favourites so far have been ScrotWM and Openbox, mainly for their no-nonsense approach and relatively straightforward configs. Ratpoison is great as well, especially on an old laptop with a malfunctioning touchpad (RP has no mouse support, FYI). I found PekWM and OpenBox to have similar features and performance, though I obviously don't have as much experience with Pek as Hanna does.

I couldn't stand AwesomeWM (it just tries too hard and has shitty syntax, imo... sorry fanboys) and ION3 (probably my fault for not configuring it properly). BlackBox was fun and nostalgic, but seemed a bit plain compared to the other *box WMs.

Compiz standalone is fun if you like bling and effects (way better than Gnome + Compiz, imho), but performance and stability vary depending on version.

Planning to try FVWM and maybe Subtle in the coming weeks, once I find time to sort out a new GRML based install (preferably on my netbook). From what I've heard, FVWM seems the fastest out of the lot with regards to sheer responsiveness.

Among those I've tried, Musca and ScrotWM seem a tad more responsive then the rest, though the difference is negligible, and your mileage may vary depending on underlying packages/libraries/daemons installed.

Cheers.

Edit:
If you're talking about sheer coolness, look at this, http://www.hiprank.com/awesome-vs-dwm-v … monad.html , apply the increasingly relevant "humanity is tasteless" rule, and you'll deduce that DWM is the only cool WM out there (it's the project that gave us the ultra-spectacular Dmenu, after all), by a wide margin .... the rest are just for fakes and poseurs

Edit Mk 2:
Wouldn't this topic be more suited for the "WM/DE Talk" section?

Last edited by gutterslob (2010-11-09 00:11:46)

#! with something other than Openbox or Xfce isn't really #! anymore :-D

Exactly. That's why I'm running Windows everytime I actually have work to do. Can't stop me from tinkering with all those nice things Linux can do.

I tried to do tax stuff, installed wine for the official tax software of our finacial bureau. Guess what... I ended up recompiling...

Done.

Although I don't run #!, I have tried awesome and scrotwm. I think my machine is too powerful for me to notice a speed difference between Openbox and awesome. Tiling is cool though.

It's not about Wine not working... it's about "hmm wasn't there a nifty patch for something totally different". As soon as I'm on Linux, I start tinkering.

Have you check out this guide?

http://wmii.googlecode.com/hg/doc/wmii.pdf

The Arch wiki has some info too:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wmii

Thanks for the info.  I glanced at the Arch one I will check the other one as well

[edit]  The .pdf one looks really good.  Thanks again. 

Edit again:  Yep, I did miss the edit button.  Sorry for the double post feel free to delete one or both.

Last edited by ElderV.LaCoste (2010-11-09 18:35:53)

I haven't used any of the other light ones, but I had compiz and metacity on #! 9.04 for a time, and it was definitely very nice looking.

@Elder
Oh crap... did I really say that? O_o
It's a tad inaccurate. (I better go find that post and edit it)

Anyhoo, heres what you do to pipe conky to the bar

I assume you already have your ~/.scrotwm.conf.
In it there should be a line that starts with "bar_action".  It usually defaults to "baraction.sh", but you should tell it to read your ~/.conkyrc instead

bar_action     = conky

You also need to tell your conky to output its sorry self to the console and make sure your desired variables are a single line.

Here's my ~/.conkyrc as an example:

# Conky configuration for ScrotWM Bar

##############################################
#  Settings
##############################################
out_to_x no
background no
out_to_console yes
update_interval 1
total_run_times 0
use_spacer none
#no_buffers yes
#cpu_average_samples 1
#net_average_samples 1
TEXT
    CPU - ${cpu cpu0}.00%   RAM - ${memperc}.00%   Temperature - ${acpitemp}C   Battery - ${battery_percent BAT0}%   WiFi - ${wireless_link_qual wlan0}%   Uploads - ${upspeedf wlan0}kb/s   Downloads - ${downspeedf wlan0}kb/s

Hope this helps.
Cheers.

Edit:
I had to make sure the "update_interval" in my conkyrc and the "bar_delay" in my .scrotwm.conf were both set to 1 ... the bar flickered a lot otherwise.

Last edited by gutterslob (2010-11-10 19:41:43)

@Gutterslob - Thanks for posting your Conky.  That did the trick.  I'm gonna keep Scrotwm.

Pekwm is pretty neat. I started messing around with it in the summer (then I stopped messing around with everything for a while) but it was a lot of fun. I should try it again.

Does anyone know how to add Ratpoison to GDM?  I found this but it doesn't
work:

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/7061/2/

There is no Ratpoison.desktop file.

Last edited by ElderV.LaCoste (2010-11-11 16:23:42)