Need a window manager

davidbrit2

davidbrit2

Licensed Computer Geek
I've got XFree86 up and running, but the included TWM window manager is crappy, to say the least. Has anyone compiled a better alternative? KDE or Gnome would be great, but I'm having problems getting KDE going.
 
Has anyone tried afterstep/AnotherLevel? I use them on intel redhat and I love them.

I tried the steps from trickX.com (I think that was the site). But they didn't work. I'm not at my os X box at the moment (at bald head island, beach.... hehe...). But I believe there was some problem with checking if gcc worked (I thought it worked fine when I compiled ssh for os 10.0.0 oh well...)

Thanks for your help people!
 
definatly check out enlightenment! You can see tons of screenshots at e.themes.org.

-jdog
 
I'll have to see if I can get Enlightenment to compile sometime. It's no KDE, but it will do. ;-)
 
wmaker is far more practical, especially with gparker's rootless patch for XDarwin 0.5

wmaker has an option where a click will focus a window and be eaten. This is the same behavior as OS X and helps a lot.
 
What do you mean a window gets eaten? Are you referring to focus? Enlightenment allows you to change focus anyway you want including, just moving the mouse over the window. But then again, you would have to actually pay attention to what you are doing, which strobe obviously does no like to do.:D

KDE and GNOME are Desktop Environments. Enlightenment, WindowMaker, BlackBox, Sawmill, etc are all window managers. You can run pretty much all Gnome/KDE applications from within Enlightenment. Enlightenment allows you to customize EVERY part of the interface, whereas KDE (using KWM) is not very customizable. The latest version of Enlightenment available is 0.16.5, they are working on 0.17 which is pretty much a complete rewrite that will take the place of the Desktop Environments. I cannot wait to see how it turns out.

-jdog
 
The click event gets eaten (if you call them events in X11).

There are various options. One is click to focus, another is click to focus and the click doesn't get eaten (it clicks whatever is in the window) another is click to focus where the click gets eaten. The former behavior was like OSXPB, the latter is like the release version.

I've used several and wmaker is definitely the least confusing in OS X. In rootless mode (gparker's patch) the dock also works well. wmaker dock on the left, Apple dock on the right.

Enlightenment is just tries to eat more CPU than Quartz.
 
So where could I find the source code for wmaker? Hopefully it's an easy build.

And also, I'm still just amazed that two window managers can cooperatively share one screen. Windows 9X has a hard enough time just by itself. :)
 
Speaking of which. Does anybody have any idea why TWM is the only window manager that will run rootless for me?

Afterstep (1.8.0) kills Xfree with no useful errors. Enlightenment (0.16.5) loads, starts up its default startup apps than dies similarly. Fvwm2 (2.2.4) starts up but will not let me move or resize windows. I would appreciate hints on any of these.

I am running XFree86 4.0.3 with the .6 rootless patches on 10.0.4.
 
Maybe I'm blind.

I know about the Aqua 0.6 available, but that doesn't run anything rootless for me. Is that it, or is there something else I'm missing?

-Rob
 
Originally posted by rharder
Maybe I'm blind.

I know about the Aqua 0.6 available, but that doesn't run anything rootless for me. Is that it, or is there something else I'm missing?

-Rob
Click to expand...

Maybe I have just forgotten where I got the rootless stuff. Not unlikely, really.

What switches did you add to the startx command? I run it thusly: startx -- -quartz -rootless although I am fairly positive Parker's directions originally told me to run it as startx -- -quartz -aqua, which did not work for me.

If not, I'll look around for the patch and/or binaries on my boxen.
 
You have to get a patched version of XDarwin and use the -rootless flag.

BTW there shouldn't be an 'Aqua' mode, that would be a complete misnomer.
 
In my experience the IceWM works best in rootless mode. You can have the dock on the bottom and the Aqua dock on the left or right (how to change it see osx.u.nu). I installed it using fink without any problems. Since I am using Xfree86 4.0.2 with G.Parkers` rootless patch I had to install Xtools in order to get shared libraries but do not need it anymore. It seems to be more stable than wmaker that crashes sometimes in rootless mode at least with my configuration.
 
With wmaker it's Dock is wherever you want it. I leave it in the bottom-left and the OS X Dock on the bottom-right.
 
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