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Blackbox (Finally) Updated 311

Posted by timothy from the occasional-and-careful dept.
mpeg4codec writes "OSNews reported earlier this month that the lightweight Blackbox window manager has been updated to 0.70. Among the new features are EWMH compliance, anti-aliased fonts, unicode support, and backwards compatibility with previous versions' styles. Of course, it brings you all these new features (well, some are optional) while retaining its small binary size, small memory footprint, and short list of dependencies. I for one think it's about time."
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Blackbox (Finally) Updated More

Blackbox (Finally) Updated

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  • They took too long (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mancat ( 831487 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @12:51AM (#12073330) Homepage
    Too bad that Fluxbox has already killed it off.

  • It's about time? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @12:52AM (#12073338) Homepage
    Blackbox has been working great on my machines for 4+ years. This new version looks kind of neat but I'm in no rush to upgrade just for AA fonts. EWMH complance doesn't mean anything to me.

    • Re:It's about time? (Score:5, Informative)

      by abiessu ( 74684 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @02:28AM (#12073715) Journal
      "... no rush to upgrade... "

      Normally I'd agree. In this case, blackbox being as lightweight as it is, and having very little in the way of external dependencies, I went for the upgrade as soon as I saw it. Not a mistake per se, except that almost none of the stock styles work properly (read: invisible menu text, font/border/margin sizes changing wildly). Fortunately, one of the stock styles still worked well enough to navigate. I drilled through the new wiki site to find the 'full example' style for 0.70 and dropped that in. The second unfortunate turn is that the full example also has the invisible text problem. After about an hour of tweaking and paring down it was usable, but the whole experience leaves me with, "yep, you're right to hold off on this one."

      Of course, it's possible that there are some conflicts with old (0.65) files on that box...

    • Re:It's about time? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Zwets ( 645911 )

      It took me a while, but I managed to find out what EWMH is (the linked page wasn't very helpful, didn't even explain the acronym):

      From this page [gnome.org]:

      The EWMH, or Extended Window Manager Hints is a freedesktop.org- developed standard to support a number of conventions for communication between the window manager and clients. It builds on and extends the ICCCM (See Section 3). A copy of the current EWMH standard is available at http://freedesktop.org/Standards/wm-spec/

    • Blackbox is not even listed as EWMH compliant yet, what is taking so long?

      http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/wm-spec [freedesktop.org]

      just kidding...

  • I'm a heretic! Burn me! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @12:53AM (#12073341) Journal
    So I went over to the screenshot site (second one from the bottom) and was under-impressed with what they had displayed. I said to myself, "Self, this looks like any other WM." To which I replied, "Yep."

    I guess you could say I was crazy, but maybe I'm missing something here. What does this offer that other WMs don't offer?

    And it just occurred to me that "small size" is not really a big selling point. Maybe if this was on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM, memory footprint would become a big deal, but if I'm running a system with an actual window manager, not to mention a window server like X, the least of my worries is lack of memory.

    • Re:I'm a heretic! Burn me! (Score:4, Informative)

      by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @01:07AM (#12073393) Homepage
      And it just occurred to me that "small size" is not really a big selling point.

      If you're trying to get Linux and X running on a minimalist platform, small size suddenly becomes very important. Small size also implies fast, and if you're working on real-time graphics, that's a big plus. I don't think it's something I'm going to want, but freedom of choice is an important part of Linux. I wish them the best of luck.

      • Re:I'm a heretic! Burn me! (Score:3, Informative)

        by ajs ( 35943 )
        "If you're trying to get Linux and X running on a minimalist platform, small size suddenly becomes very important. Small size also implies fast, and if you're working on real-time graphics, that's a big plus."

        Nope. First off, small size does not imply fast. Plenty of applications trade memory footprint for a speed gain (e.g. by keeping often used data in-core).

        Second, real-time graphics depends on the X server, integrated hardware acceleration features and other non-window manager issues. There's really n

    • Re:I'm a heretic! Burn me! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @01:11AM (#12073406) Homepage Journal
      The people who built the later cathedrals in the rennaiscance were of the same opinion. Backed by incredibly wealthy patrons and a surplus of masons, they laughed at earlier era's notions of simplicity. The least of their worries was running out of ink on the blueprints, or running out of tasks for the artisans to perform. "More curliques!" was their battle cry.

      And thus they invented Baroque. It's a nice style, if you're into that kind of thing. But it's hardly a universal aesthetic.
    • Although I chose Fluxbox for my WM, I can say that memory consumption was a factor while installing linux on my Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop. 800mhz, 256mb ram. Gnome was just a pig on the poor machine, while fluxbox brought it back to snappy goodness.

      Different strokes for different folks.

      • I've tried both IceWM and Fluxbox, and to tell the truth I didnt see any speed increase over IceWM with fluxbox. And since IceWM had anti-aliased fonts and a nice toolbar, I started using it as my main light weight WM.

        • I've tried both IceWM and Fluxbox, and to tell the truth I didnt see any speed increase over IceWM with fluxbox. And since IceWM had anti-aliased fonts and a nice toolbar, I started using it as my main light weight WM.

          Personally I find IceWM noticably faster than Fluxbox on my system. I really want to like the *box varients - there's a lot of nice things about them, especially tabs - but IceWM beats them all in speed, look and feel, and as a result has been my only WM for over four years now.

      • Re:I'm a heretic! Burn me! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs.ajs@com> on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @08:29AM (#12074890) Homepage Journal
        Fluxbox is a window manager. Gnome is a desktop environment.

        Please stop confusing the two. You can, quite legitimately, use fluxbox as your Gnome window manager (though its support for Gnome desktop APIs is only in its early stages), so saying that "Gnome was just a pig" doesn't say anything about fluxbox and its comparative performance.

        Metacity, on the other hand (Gnome's default window manager) may or may not compare favorably to Fluxbox (I haven't tried a bare Metacity to compare against), but in using just a window manager, you lose all of the benefits of a desktop environment: session management, cross-application configuration parameters, uniform high-level drag and drop, etc.

        You may not care about these things, but they are the core of a modern desktop environment, and have NOTHING to do with what window manager you select.
    • If you were putting together machines for poor people in your town by refurbishing machines people are willing to donate to your cause, you would care about how large the OS is and how much RAM it requires to do ordinary tasks.

    • I guess you could say I was crazy, but maybe I'm missing something here. What does this offer that other WMs don't offer?

      I was working on some power management tweaks the other day for my laptop and discovered that KDE was producing dirty pages like crazy. These would get written back by the pdflush threads in the kernel every 15 seconds or so. The short version of this story is that the disk was never idle long enough to timeout. I switched to Blackbox and it stopped. While I prefer KDE, I use Bl

      • Did you enable laptop_mode? I find that running the default laptop_mode script (in linux/Documentation/laptop_mode.txt) with "noatime" set in fstab for all partitions reduced disk activity hugely.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Sorry, you are just to slow moving for me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CaptainPinko ( 753849 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @12:55AM (#12073346)

    Who trusts something that moves so slow? I mean unless it's perfect or have the means to fix it yourself... unless it already does 100% of what you you 100% well.

    If I report an annoying bug when will it get fixed? If I request a feature when will I get a response?

    While KDE may not be perfect my bugreports get responded too fairly quickly and it's getting better all the time.

    Perhaps, there is something that Fluxbox or Openbox (which appears dead..) can use I don't see this benefiting anyone but a few users and thus not really news worthey. Perhaps for embedded kiosk or something...

    • Re:Sorry, you are just to slow moving for me (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @01:05AM (#12073382) Homepage Journal
      I mean unless it's perfect...

      Not yet, but it's approaching it :-)

      I think the Free Software crowd is becoming jaded with continual release after release after release. Does one need to keep on adding features just to attract attention? Does one need to purposely introduce bugs just so there's an excuse to cut a new release in six months?

      Sometimes you just have to realize that the software is done. Finished. Completed. That software is Blackbox.
      • Yup, I'm using it.
        I like the edge resistance (just slamming windows towards the corner to line them up nicely). I also like the simple, central configuration file. Even tho it's XML-puke it's bearable.

        What I'm missing (is it there? have I overlooked it?):

        - Send window to desktop N *and* switch there from the context menu
        In blackbox I can right-click the titlebar, middle-click "send to N" and
        it will take both me and the window there. In openbox I can only send the
        window away from the context menu

    • Re:Sorry, you are just to slow moving for me (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jameth ( 664111 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @01:28AM (#12073488)
      Well, Blackbox is a little different. First off, Blackbox is a window manager. KDE is a DE, hence the DE in the name. KWin doesn't really get all that many bugs. It's had a total of about a thousand in three years, about one a day. And most of those didn't matter.

      It is also important to note that I have never had BB crash. Never. I don't use it anymore, I use KDE. However, when I ran BB for about a year, it never crashed. I occasionally got bothered with having to add everything I wanted manually and having trouble configuring it, but there weren't any 'bugs', just wishlist type items. BB really has been stable basically forever because it has always had an extremely precise goal that was well scoped from the start.

      And as for this not mattering to many users, BB is one of the landmark WMs, truly. Just look at how many people use the BB forks. It's one of the all-time favorite WMs out there, and even today, after all this time, is the best looking. It definitely is newsworthy when BB gets a new release.
    • Eh dude, I don't care about KDE, I do care about blackbox; you are not better than me (I couldn't be wrong, of course), ergo, it's sufficiently "newsworthy".

      Don't worry, they are not going to run out of "digital ink" anytime soon; all these stories you are not interested in are not really impacting your quality of life.

  • Keeping a low profile? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Attackman ( 95672 ) * <tom@tomtostanCOMMAoski.com minus punct> on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @01:00AM (#12073361) Homepage Journal
    Looking at their homepage (assuming you still can, as this is an early post), it looks as if nothing's been updated since November of 2004. The new version is available on the download page, though you'd think they'd post something to the effect of ".70 is now up" right on the front page.
    I can only assume these cats are looking to keep a low profile, or to keep a static homepage that they never have to touch.
    Nuances of their site design and motives aside, I'm enticed to try this out.

  • WM & Desktop Environment should match... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EnronHaliburton2004 ( 815366 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @01:07AM (#12073392) Homepage Journal
    Call me silly, but the WM & Desktop Environment should have a matching theme.

    I know it's a matter of taste, but I can't stand it when I have one theme for my Window Manager, and a second theme for all those applications which run within the windows... it's ugly, less functional, and way, way outdated.

    I suppose that BlackBox & IceWM might be faster then the default KDE or Gnome WM's, but performance isn't usually a big issue for me.

    Although, I can see the benefit when I need to run a remote X application on a remote server, and I don't want a full fledged Gnome or KDE environment... just X, a lightweight WM over a SSH connection.
    • If I get what you mean, I'd have to disagree just out of my own personal tastes.

      Having the capability to change window borders AND then system controls as seperate entities is a huge improvement over Windows singular theme configurations.

      If I want a southside window border, but end up finding a better gtk theme that blends better for my eyes.. then by all means I'll use two different themes. An example is here:

      http://thetao.sourceforge.net/_screenshots/yang s cr eenshot3.jpg

      The option of being able to us

    • Re:WM & Desktop Environment should match... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by brlancer ( 666140 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @03:00AM (#12073826) Homepage Journal
      I suppose that BlackBox & IceWM might be faster then the default KDE or Gnome WM's, but performance isn't usually a big issue for me.

      Some of us use computers for real work.

      Window managers are definately a matter of personal taste, but I have real work to do on my boxes and I won't waste cycles on bloated DE's like KDE and Gnome. Blackbox is FAST. It's minimalist, reliable, and simple. It's not something I would get for my grandmother (or my wife) but when I need to be able to sit down at my computer and do real _work_, I could care less what the icons look like or what theme I'm using. Funtionality is different than eye candy. KDE and Gnome cater to an entirely different crowd than Blackbox and they've succumbed to trying to be everything to everyone.

      Blackbox has a very strong following because it does exactly what it sets out to do. If you have the spare cycles to waste then go for something pretty, but there are lots of people for whom performance is a big issue.

      I can see the benefit when I need to run a remote X application on a remote server

      Or on an old laptop which needs to boot quickly to access machines across a serial terminal. Or on new desktops where I'm running multiple browsers, dozens of aterms (with screen sessions), mutt for email, xmms or realplayer for music, gaim, a half dozen company tools (not lightweight), et al.

      Well, I guess "new" is relative. My "new" box is 3 years old and my "old" box is 5 years old.

  • Seeing as this Black Box fathered so many other window manangers that "Black Box Style" is a term used to describe several window managers these days, this is good news to see a new version come out.

  • So... (Score:3, Funny)

    by nacturation ( 646836 ) <nacturation AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @01:12AM (#12073412) Journal
    How exactly is this going to enable me to make free long distance [wikipedia.org] calls?

  • EWMH and the whole story... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gopal.V ( 532678 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @01:14AM (#12073419) Homepage Journal
    It's about time it came out with EWMH .. I've already switched to fluxbox (yeah, and fluxgen is a very helpful guy on irc).

    You might want to say that Forking is bad for the health of any project - but sometimes such branching off can keep a project alive. If there hadn't been a fluxbox - I'd have dumped blackbox for good.

    Is there any reason for blackbox anymore ?. (well, other than the "choice" factor).
  • I used to make themes for Enlightenment about five years ago, and lately I've been feeling like making themes again. However the WM landscape has changed a lot. Blackbox is awesome but it seems like the themes aren't very flexible - such as moving the close widget around, and such.

    Of hand, does anyone know of a WM that's relaly easy to customize, but also very flexible?
    • > Of hand, does anyone know of a WM that's relaly
      > easy to customize, but also very flexible?

      IceWM is pretty decent. In an afternoon I had redrawn all the window widgets, put them where I wanted, and gotten rid of ones I didn't want.
    • Of hand, does anyone know of a WM that's relaly easy to customize, but also very flexible?

      Easy and flexible are opposites, unfortunately. Something like Blackbox allows you to define a few gradients and call it finished, but you don't get a lot of flexibility. KWin allows you to do *anything*, but you have to write your own plugin. Towards the easy side you also have IceWM and Windowmaker, while towards the flexible side you have Metacity and Fvwm.

  • I'd just be happy with.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mikefoley ( 51521 ) <`mike' `at' `yelof.com'> on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @01:22AM (#12073457) Homepage
    ....a Metacity theme that would work well on an 800x600 display. (it's a laptop, it's paid for, it runs Linux quite well with the exception of Metacity/GTK's insistance on using HUGE buttons)

    FWIW, XP looks and runs fine. If I could just get the same sizing, this laptop would be rid of the Microsoft scurge. Believe me, I'm SO feckin' fed up with MS.

  • People say development is too slow.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well... that's ok. Because this is an _OPEN SOURCE_ window manager! Nobody is telling you to use it. It's there because someone cares about blackbox, and they've had some time to update it.

    Remember, you didn't pay for this, so don't go disrespecting someone's hard work just because it doesn't update enough for you. There are people who like blackbox. And besides, it's just kind of a cool window manager.

  • Blackbox is ok, but.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SocialEngineer ( 673690 ) <invertedpanda@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @01:24AM (#12073472) Homepage
    I prefer the likes of BadWM. Sadly, though, it is in dire need of an update. People are working on it, sorta :/ BadWM is what a minimalistic WM should be (IMHO) - no window decorations except for a border around the window, quick keyboard commands, and it handles virtual desktops. I really don't like having a titlebar on my windows.

    I've been using Ion2 recently, and it isn't too bad either.. it's fast, although switching from BadWM to a tiling WM is a bit difficult :P

    As far as those saying WMs shouldn't have to worry about memory footprints.. I have 768 megs of RAM, and I still don't like a WM that hogs RAM. I do memory-intensive work, and I don't want my WM taking up all my RAM just so it can look pretty. Even if I had 2 gigs of RAM, I'd still prefer BadWM or Ion2.
  • Seriously. Grab the Resident Set Size number from "top" or "ps" and compare it to...

    wait for it...

    fvwm 2 (latest dev build).

    My Slackware compile has both the regular fvwm2 and FvwmButtons clocked in at 2800K+.

    Blackbox's RSS supposedly clocks it in at 2200K.

    Let's see...

  • Oblig. (Score:3, Funny)

    by PoprocksCk ( 756380 ) <poprocks@gmail.org> on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @01:37AM (#12073525) Homepage Journal
    In Soviet Russia, the window manages YOU!

  • Define "small binary size"... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bebing ( 624220 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @01:58AM (#12073606)
    This is important to me as I'm running linux on a playstation 2. I use mwm which I've always liked since I first used it quite some time ago. The binary clocks in at 1985399 bytes. In my research I've compiled and tried many different wms, one being blackbox which clocked in at 7965606 bytes, about 4x the size of mwm. Maybe I didn't compile it with some minimalist options turned on? Don't get me wrong I feel blackbox is a great product, but so far mwm is the best fit for my sit.

    • I've got a Thinstation iso with Blackbox on it and the whole iso is only 5.4M. The stuff on it is probably compressed, but I really doubt that the whole thing (including kernel, X server, xterm, and a bunch of networking clients) compresses to less than Blackbox. I rarely use it, but I think it's got a bunch of optional add-on programs that you might have included.

    • I'm curious; are you using the Sony PS2 Linux kit? I've been having trouble finding information on running Linux on a PS2 without it. I have the network adapter and a spare hard drive, and I'd love to set up a TV-comp for brother to use instead of my laptop.
    • Did you link libXm to MWM statically or dynamically? It makes a pretty big difference.

    • Re:Define "small binary size"... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by k8to ( 9046 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @04:02AM (#12074047) Homepage

      Small is wm2.

      jrodman@Skonnos:~ >ls -l $(which wm2)
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 63724 Dec 10 13:36 /usr/bin/wm2

      At 63724 bytes, it's less than a third of the binary size of mwm that you quote, and it doesn't link against any huge bloated and unpleasant motif library. In fact, it only uses libXext, and X11 on top of the usual stdc++, libm, libgcc, libc, libdl and ld-linux. in-memory size can be as little as 10k malloced on top of the 60k image.

    • I use wmx, the binary of which comes in at 102100 bytes. That's about 20 times smaller than your mwm, which you say is 4 times smaller than blackbox.
    • It's 300k on Debian. That's dynamically linked against the core X11 libraries, but you need those anyway, so there is no harm in dynamic linking it.

      Maybe your binary was accidentally linked statically.

  • pekwm? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm surprised no one has mentioned pekwm, which just released a new dev release not to long ago.

    http://pekwm.org/ [pekwm.org]

    Here's a shot: http://img9.exs.cx/img9/885/pekwmdevpypanelrox9ss. png [img9.exs.cx]

  • Apostriphication (Score:5, Funny)

    by LadyLucky ( 546115 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @02:26AM (#12073708) Homepage
    I for one would like to congratulate the article submitter in having possibly the first correct use of the apostrophe in the history of Slashdot.

    Very Good!

  • BB for windows (Score:5, Informative)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @02:43AM (#12073779) Journal
    I like how I can use Blackbox for windows and use the same themes.
    http://www.bb4win.org/news.php

    People walk up and seem me using rxvt from cygwin and bb4win and they dont realize im in windows, till I open Exchange. :)

  • There are two sides... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TerminaMorte ( 729622 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @02:52AM (#12073807) Homepage
    I keep seeing posts that complain that "Well, this is great if memory is a problem, but for me it isn't so here's a list of reasons why I wouldn't never use it..." Why post useful drivel like this? (Oh, right, slashdot...) If your machine can handle a heavy GUI, you're *probally* going to use KDE/Gnome (or maybe XFCE). If you use a computer that's less than 600mhz, you're probally going to use Blackbox, Openbox, Fluxbox, etc. Or, once again, maybe XFCE (It's sexy, isn't it? ;)) This is really great to see that they're trying to update the light WMs, while still letting them remain useful in the same way they (hopefully) will always be: A good way to revive old hardware w/o having to install Windows NT or 98.

  • Lightweight is GOOD (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Beolach ( 518512 ) <beolach@NOsPaM.juno.com> on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @03:16AM (#12073874) Homepage Journal
    So, I'm reading lots of comments here about how people have nice new computers with lots of RAM & fast CPUs, so they don't need to worry about memory footprint etc. I call BS. Just because you have good enough hardware to cope with bloatware is no reason to use bloatware. My desktop at home is an Athlon64 3200+ w/ 2 GiB RAM. It could handle any WM I choose to throw on it. I choose lightweight WMs (fluxbox, currently), and I will try the new blackbox. Not because I'm limited by my hardware, but because I prefer the clean design that is inherant in lightweight WMs. And I don't use or want many of the features and eyecandy in some of the heavier WMs, so there's no reason for me to use one, even though my hardware could handle it easily.

    Now, don't get me wrong, if you prefer KDE or Gnome or Enlightenment or whatever over blackbox, then that's fine; but don't use "I have good hardware" as a reason not to use a lightweight WM. Say "I like X, which lightweight WMs don't have" and I will respect you. Disagree, likely, but I will respect your opinion.

  • What do you mean, "about time"?! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thisisauniqueid ( 825395 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @04:02AM (#12074046)
    Where do you get off saying something like, "I for one think it's about time"? Did you contribute even a single line of code to get it to this point?
    Please show a little gratitude to the developers. They're volunteers, after all.

  • argh! (Score:3, Funny)

    by mattyrobinson69 ( 751521 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @09:04AM (#12075040)
    anti-aliased fonts! thats just bloat! we should learn to listen and type in binary (beep beep BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!)

    seriously though i prefer blackbox to fluxbox and openbox (if i ever break kde or need my resources i use blackbox)

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