[ILUG] (no subject)

[Raymond Kelly]

"John P. Looney" wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Nov 18, 1999 at 03:59:09PM +0000, ray at phbrink.ie mentioned:
> > On Thu, 18 Nov 1999 O'Regan_Conan/Ireland_BH_Computer_Development at beaumont.ie wrote:
> > |     I'm wondering whats the most common default desktop enviroment been
> > |     used around here??? Gnome or Kde or what???
> > fvwm-1.24r under Red Hat 5.2 6.0 & 6.1 & suse 5.2
> > Occasionally I'll use afterstep (not very often though)
> > small fast & much easier to configure (vi ~/.fvwmrc rocks) than all the
> > new fangled all singin & dancin do stuff without tellin ya (ala windoze)
> > WMs
> 
>  I'm sorry, but memories of fvwm from years ago definitly don't track with
> that synopsis...you muct be just lazy & happy enough :)

Lazy is deffinetely true as I think there's still something in there
from my brief stint in ul that rsh's across to The well gone
136.201.4.54, & the icon search paths are still stuck to the old
slackware ones (with a few /usr/local/?? thrown in later for red-hat 4.x
compatibility)

When you look at it though what do you use a windowmanager for ...
IMHO it's a convienent way of managing multiple apps, 
and as far as I can see these managing "operations" are basically

#1 start something (automatically or otherwise)
#2 switch between this & some other app
#3 close that something

ease of use is a big thing but by & large anything outside of that is
wasteful

#1 under fvwm I use goodstuff to swallow: asclock, coolmail, a 2x4 pager
& xload for about 4 different systems, the only other things which are
there are buttons which will rsh/ssh onto various machines on & off the
lan. anything else I'll start from typing "setenv DISPLAT
wherever:0.0;command +arg &" in an xterm, which from experience I've
found to be way faster than clicking  "footprint/apple/start button"
followed by a rake of submenus. Ok when you start something from a cli
you may or may not take full advantages of a "theme" but these I believe
are superflous(sp) things which can get in the way of real work as they
make starting something a hell of a lot slower (gnome/enlightenment on a
machine with less than 128Mb Ram quickly springs to mind) also you know
how long you can spend "just customising the title bar". Anyway what's
wrong with "xv -root -quit bill_with_custard_on_face.jpg" or "xsetroot
-solid darkslategrey"

#2 This is much of a muchness between various wm's with everything
seeming to congregate on the windoze way of doing it via the keyboard &
some form of a windowlist avaliable by using some definable mouse button
on the root-window. ok quite often there is some form of a pager
avaliable which may provide means for raising/lowering stuff but all
this is usually standard. Other ways are the old sloppy focus stuff with
the optional & very f**king annoying raise the window while you're at
it. yada yada yada

#3 God bless xkill :) 

My main reason for sticking with something so antiquated is that it does
what I want without getting in the way of other things that I do, ie
it's been arond long enough to have (most of) the bugz booted, It's an
absolute royal pain in the hole when your WM bombs (windowmaker = major
guilty party here) ok you expect it if you're using windoze or a mac &
adjust your habits accordingly ,ie save every 5 minutes, but with fvwm
I've had Xsessions which have gone on for up to two months, invariably
killed by a Netscape + java combination, also the windowmanager _never_
shows up anywhere at the top of the list when I run top unlike
kwm/enlightenment/wmaker 
There are some very nifty apps which are designed for use with these new
WM's, kcrontab, gmc, & gtcd to name the ones which I've currently
running, These have definately made things easier especialy to take the
kcrontab example, if one, like me is continously making an arse of the
*'s in a crontab.

Maybe I'm just happy.... but I doubt it!

l8r
	Ray ...

-- 
Raymond Kelly: ray at phbrink.ie: Systems Administrator:
PH Brink International, Ballybrit Business Park, Galway, Ireland:
TEL: +353 91 771181: Mobile: +353 87 2886761 (Caller ID only):