Re: [BLUG] Choosing a Window Manager at login

On Wed, Jun 03, 2009 at 05:20:36PM -0400, Gillis, Chad wrote:
> Okay thanks. That'll make it easier now that I know what term to
> google. Thanks for the offer for the help too. Since I'd have more
> than one window manager installed, I can foresee maybe some difficulties
> on telling X which one to use. In my ~/.xsession, the final command is
> "exec fvwm". Maybe it's just a matter of changing the fvwm in that line
> to something else, and back again if I want to switch back?

You're talking about exploring some of the other window manager options.

The canonical way to do this in the past was to change the 'exec fvwm'
to 'exec xterm', then from within that Xterm, start up different
window managers. That really only works when dealing with true window
managers, as it is less effective when dealing with full desktop
"environments". (The 'E' in both GNOME and KDE stand for 'environment'.)
These things consist of a number of separate processes that all have to
be started/stopped cleanly.

There have been tools you can use to pick the window manager at login. I
don't remember any names off-hand, but I've seen mention of such things
in the past.

Both KDM and GDM support a concept of a "default window manager",
and allow you to pick your new window manager at login time. They'll
remember the last setting, but allow you to pick a new one quickly and
easily. They also both properly handle all of the processes involved in
starting up GNOME, KDE, or another complete desktop environment. (Such
as XFCE.)

My recommendation is actually to install GDM. Even though the name is
"GNOME Desktop Manager", it really only has requirements on GTK. It
is richly themable, so you can customize the appearance regardless of
the specific window manager you decide to use. If you have the Gimp or
Firefox installed, you already have requirements on GTK, so it doesn't
really increase your disk resources by much.

Then you can install and try out other environments and window managers.

If you do not already use a Debian-derived distribution, you may want to
consider switching. Debian-derived distributions which include the full
set of Debian packages (this includes Ubuntu) have an insane list of
window managers and desktop environments available, all of them install
quickly and easily. Some of them may depend upon toolkits you've never
heard of (such as FLTK). Unless you *really* like compiling things by
hand, it is easy to restrict your choices to those that ship with the
distro, and know that they'll "just work".

While I'm a big fan of Ubuntu and KDE, for a desktop system with fewer
than average resources I highly recommend Debian. You have lighter
weight versions of almost every tool available. (While these same tools
are available in Ubuntu, some tools are expected norms in Ubuntu, and
changing/removing them may harm your ability to upgrade in the future.)

Cheers,

--
Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
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