michapma wrote:

"You guys are really and truly evil. After spending a few hours yesterday configuring icewm..."
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Hours? Did you read the section "IceWM Tips" in the Post-Installation sticky at the top of the page?

apt-get install icewm icewm-themes iceme

shouldn't take but 20-30 minutes the first time! I keep my ~/.icewm keys and preferences at my yahoo mail, and just cut and paste.

Ratpoison is a great minimalist window manager, very light-weight and very fast. It opens all windows in fullscreen mode, which is mostly fine but doesn't work that well with some applications that use multiple windows (GIMP!) or with the dialogue "pop-up" boxes that some apps have. Still, ratpoison is simply great! In case someone wants to try it, I'll give you here the basic in-built keybindings to get you started with ratpoison:

RATPOISON'S KEYBINDINGS:
-- enter a ratpoison's internal command: "Ctrl-t :"
-- enter a shell command: "Ctrl-t !"
-- open a terminal window: "Ctrl-t c"

-- info about all open windows: "Ctrl-t w"
-- info about the currently active window: "Ctrl-t i"
-- activate an opened window number n (n=0-9): "Ctrl-t n"
-- activate the next window: "Ctrl-t n"
-- activate the previous window: "Ctrl-t p"
-- flip back and forth between two windows: "Ctrl-t Ctrl-t"

-- split frame horizontally (into two windows, one on top of the other): "Ctrl-t s"
-- split frame vertically (into two windows, side by side): "Ctrl-t S"
-- maximize the active window: "Ctrl-t Q"

-- close the active window: "Ctrl-t k"
-- kill the active window (in case it refuses to close): "Ctrl-t K"

-- display time: "Ctrl-t a"
-- maximize the currently active window: "Ctrl-t l"

-- indicate which is the current frame: "Ctrl-t f"
-- cycle through frames: "Ctrl-t tab"
-- switch to the last focused frame: "Ctrl-t Alt-tab"
-- kill all frames except the current one: "Ctrl-t Q"
-- kill the current frame: "Ctrl-t R"

RATPOISON'S INTERNAL COMMANDS:
-- exit your ratpoison session: "quit"

When you press the "Ctrl" and "t" keys simultaneously, the cursor turns into a white square. Then you press some other key to complete the command. Pressing the "Esc" (Escape) key cancels the command. Very simple, very convenient. Please give it a try!

There's also a ratmenu (a simple ncurses Debian menu based on 9menu) and other stuff available. Read the man page for more info. Here's the ratpoison web page: http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ and here's the ratpoison wiki: http://ratpoison.elektrubadur.se/

how do Gdesklets work? I've installed the gdesklets program, how do I go about using it? is it something I need to load at startup?

I tried gdesklets once. They look very nice indeed but they also eat too much RAM to my taste. I like my programs to be efficient.

I cannot remember at the moment what steps I needed to take to make gdesklets work, IIRC the documentation wasn't too obvious. However, I can point you to a forum where you can probably find some better answers: http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=23

Issue the command below or add it to your startup list. With the amount of memory installed on my (and most newer) computers I never even notice a dent in the overall usage. If you are concerned about resources I would try something like conky or adesklets.

$ gdesklets start

Mostly I was just curious, I've seen some pretty cool screenshots using Gdesklets, but it's not real necesary. Thanks

Ubuntuforums gives some advices about using gdesklets without gnome-panel: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=3012

Then there's gkrellm that has some interesting plugins and you can grab a few nice-looking skins from http://www.muhri.net/gkrellm/

And I've already mentioned dockapps, although getting some of them to work may require tweaking config files plus reading expeditions to /usr/share/doc and man pages.

For now I'm pretty happy w/ the current fluxbox desktop I've got. When I decide I need something more, I'll come back to this thread. Thanks for all the help everyone, This is very useful

I printed it out and read it, yes. There are a TON of options in Ice though. Going through the ~/.icewm/preferences file would take long enough; I soon figured out that the package icepref configures that file for you using a GUI. Even then it took me time to try out the settings, use Ice, try something else, do this, do that. I like Ice pretty well now on my 900MHz machine, and on any machine it's the first wm I install on a new Debian install.

cheers

The simplest and best-looking desktop I've found that consumes fewest possible resources involves using either Flux or Icewm with idesk. On idesk, I configure it to use rox-filer to start all folder icons. So I double-click on something in my desktop, and it starts rox-filer. It gives the illusion of a full graphical filemanaging environment, even though it's made up of pieces of more than one. And it runs very, very smoothly.

icewm, fluxbox, idesk, and rox-filer are all available on APT and very very easy to set up.

Its that you mention it: Idesk! I cannot open it. Are there any other files involved which do not show up in the dependencies list?

Just to mention. There's a nice idesk config program, but it's not in debian repositories. Google for the rpm, use alien to make a .deb and install it. It will make idesk even better.

iDesk just does desktop icons right? Is their any other need for iDesk? Otherwise I'll skip iDesk, and just use keybindings for the programs I use most

Yea it does just icons. I don't need it either.

Who needs or uses icons? But some nice icons look fine on y're/me desktop, thats all.....