Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: Speed and Transparency 180

Posted by CmdrTaco from the back-in-the-day dept.
michuk writes "PolishLinux.org has published a review of FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: "FVWM-Crystal is an eye-candy, functional and ultra-fast desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX, based on FVWM. Crystal can be used even on very old machines, thus it is a noticeable alternative to popular desktop choices like XFCE or Fluxbox.""
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: Speed and Transparency More

FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: Speed and Transparency

Comments Filter:
  • If it's eye-candy, one must ask:

    Sure, it can be used on older machines, but what will the performance costs be? Is it going to be prohibitive to the actual functionality of the system (which, in UNIX, is what most users are using it for)?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Watson Ladd ( 955755 )
      The article says it should be compared to KDE or GNOME, not Flukebox or BlackBox in terms of functionality vs. system load.
    • when did eye-candy change from a noun to an adjective anyway?

  • Coral Cache (Score:5, Informative)

    by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Sunday September 17, 2006 @10:35AM (#16124623) Homepage Journal
    The server is melting, here's the coral cache link [nyud.net].

  • Oops (Score:5, Funny)

    by dreamchaser ( 49529 ) on Sunday September 17, 2006 @10:36AM (#16124625) Homepage Journal
    "FVWM-Crystal is an eye-candy, functional and ultra-fast desktop environment"

    As opposed to their webserver...

  • the 'f' was for feeble (Score:5, Informative)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Sunday September 17, 2006 @10:37AM (#16124632) Homepage Journal
    Since the story comments that the developers dont remember what it stood for since its 'so old' . Geeeh. Old is not a few years..
  • Trying to get to the site... and not sure if we /.ed them or if they yanked the plug and ran away when they saw the story linking to them.

    Looking forward to when the page is back up^^

  • Original sites! (Score:5, Informative)

    by MoogMan ( 442253 ) on Sunday September 17, 2006 @10:48AM (#16124657)
    Sometimes it doesn't hurt to link to the original site [fvwm-crystal.org] - or better, a pre-emptive Corel Cache of the original site [nyud.net] !

  • Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QCompson ( 675963 ) on Sunday September 17, 2006 @10:58AM (#16124696)
    Every time I have experimented with a lightweight fast desktop (fluxbox, icewm, xfce, etc.), I am initially impressed at how snappy the desktop itself feels, but once I launch a few applications, I am again disappointed at the overall slow feel of the apps themselves.

    FVWM with Nautilus? When I use nautilus in another environment (window manager, whatever), it always starts slower than it does in Gnome (I know, I know, preload gnome-stuff and all that, but if you have to do that, what's the point?). Once nautilus is open, it still behaves sluggish and ackward. And it's not just nautilus. I have the same issue with konqueror, firefox, music apps, k3b, and more. A lightweight desktop is fast if I just want to login and look at your wallpaper, but once I try to get something done, I have the same old issues.

    I can't quite describe the problem, but even after the tremendous improvements that have been made to the Linux desktop in the past few years, it still feels... slow. I'm not trying to troll here. I love Linux, and I wish it all the success in the world, but it just doesn't feel as snappy to me as windows 2000/XP. Seems like lost mouse-clicks and slow window redraws are a large part of the problem. Perhaps the problem lies with X, or with my own warped sense of perception... who knows?

    • Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kaypro ( 35263 ) on Sunday September 17, 2006 @11:16AM (#16124743)
      I have to completely agree. My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit. It's a great library but they need to concentrate I think on two main things: speed and appearance. It still feels sluggish compared to Windows and it just doesn't look quite right or polished as Windows. Some of the widgets just look awkward no matter what theme engine you use. Don't get me wrong I use Linux most of the time, but in my experience Windows still reigns in speed even compared to OSX. OSX has the appearance down pat but still is slow compared to Windows. It's minor nitpicking I know. Productivity is what counts but it would still be nice to clear these two issues up.
      • ``I have to completely agree. My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit.''

        I don't usually find GTK to be slow. Some applications that use it are slow, but others are very fast (e.g. XMMS). So I don't think it's the toolkit.

        ``It's a great library but they need to concentrate I think on two main things: speed and appearance.''

        What's wrong with GTK's appearance? Ok, the default theme is uglier than Windows, but you can theme it to your heart's content. Lots of themes to choose from;

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hpavc ( 129350 )
        Windows has thoughlessly consistent UI. If I am in a wordprocessor and use a menu item 'open file' and get a dialog to hunt and peck through my file system. then i click the application. often the application takes for the foreground and the dialog is pushed to the depths (got forbid you have auto window raising).

        this doesnt happen in windows, dialog boxes are part of the applicaion, unlike a mdi window it can move outside of the confines of the application height/width, but stay at the level for the applic

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ultranova ( 717540 )

        I have to completely agree. My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit. It's a great library but they need to concentrate I think on two main things: speed and appearance. It still feels sluggish compared to Windows and it just doesn't look quite right or polished as Windows.

        In other words, GTK is a great UI library except it's slow and looks bad :). But no, I don't think that GTK is the problem. I have a gtk-gnutella instance running in a 200MHz box, accessed over XVNC, and it

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Slayk ( 691976 )

          Gnome has its own virtual file system driver, for crying out loud ! WTF does a desktop need a file system driver for ?!?

          So that Gnome applications are portable wherever Gnome VFS exists, and gain the benefit of working with whatever GnomeVFS works with?

          I like how my desktop works pretty well over SFTP/SMB/FTP (and I guess WebDAV but I've never used that) without me caring what protocol the bits are going over. Gnome is a framework in additon to being a desktop.

          • So that Gnome applications are portable wherever Gnome VFS exists, and gain the benefit of working with whatever GnomeVFS works with?

            Ah, I see. It's a bit like Java, but not as well designed nor as efficent.

            I like how my desktop works pretty well over SFTP/SMB/FTP (and I guess WebDAV but I've never used that) without me caring what protocol the bits are going over. Gnome is a framework in additon to being a desktop.

            Which is why it's so slow. There is no problem that can't be solved by adding a lay

            • You're just going to have to wait until the typical x86 system becomes as fast as ... well, as fast as it needs to be to make the overhead of those hideous parodies acceptable. It's the Wintel Way, and while the Linux kernel may be fast and efficient the user-space desktops that are running on top of it are anything but, nowadays.

              Linux fans love to point out how "bloated" Windows as become, and how greatly major Windows apps have suffered from feature-creep. And they're right. But I don't see a lot of di

              • You're just going to have to wait until the typical x86 system becomes as fast as ... well, as fast as it needs to be to make the overhead of those hideous parodies acceptable.

                It isn't, ever. The faster processors become, the more overhead various desktop environments add. And since programs require these toolkits and libraries to run, you can't really opt out.

                Granted, a sophisticated graphical environment is resource-intensive by nature, but I can't help believing that a little more work spent on op

                • It isn't, ever. The faster processors become, the more overhead various desktop environments add. And since programs require these toolkits and libraries to run, you can't really opt out.

                  True. In other words, software expands to consume all available resources. And that's pretty much always been the case. But with aggregate processing speed about to make some substantial increases in the next decade (multicore, Cell ... whatever else comes out) I suspect that the GUI will become a relatively mature commo
            • Which is why it's so slow. There is no problem that can't be solved by adding a layer of redirection...

              In that case all we need to do is add a layer of redirection in order to speed up all the other ones ;-)

            • Which is why it's so slow. There is no problem that can't be solved by adding a layer of redirection, but every layer adds overhead and increases reaction time. And why the heck does a desktop need to work over FTP ?

              The desktop doesn't "work over FTP" in the same way that, for instance, you can tunnel your X session over SSH. Basically, there's a layer that allows any resource that can be addressed by a URL to be opened as a file pointer by a KDE app.

              This is nice. Suppose you want to update the .htacc

      • Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MartinG ( 52587 ) on Sunday September 17, 2006 @12:04PM (#16124916) Homepage Journal
        My gut feeling is that the main cause of this may be the GTK toolkit.

        Well it just so happens that gut feeling, despite being the most popular tool, is almost totally useless when applied to performance measurement in software.

        Seriously, I solve performance issues in a range of applications on an almost daily basis as part of my job. After a few years, you stop being surprised at exactly how little correlation there is between your gut feeling of what is causing slowdown and what really is.

        Measurement is the only useful approach to performance. I've said it many times before, and many greater programmers than me said it long before that.

        A couple of quotes:

        "Measurement is a crucial component of performance improvement since reasoning and intuition are fallible guides and must be supplemented with tools like timing commands and profilers." - Kernighan and Pike

        "You cannot tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so do not try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is." - Rob Pike

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by MadMidnightBomber ( 894759 )

          "Measurement is a crucial component of performance improvement since reasoning and intuition are fallible guides and must be supplemented with tools like timing commands and profilers." - Kernighan and Pike

          "You cannot tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so do not try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is." - Rob Pike

          And what would they know about programming? I'm waiting until I hear it from Bill Ga

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Misagon ( 1135 )
        I agree about GTK+. Something changed in GTK+ 1.3 way back when. Betatesters complained about sluggishness back then, were promised that things would improve when the kinks were straighted out, but nothing changed. Eventually people got faster computers, and experienced the problem less.

        If you don't believe me, get a 200 MHz computer, run a GTK+ 1.2 app from back then (e.g. X-chat), then run the same app that has been ported to GTK+ 2.0. You [i]will[/i] notice a difference!

        About MacOS X, I wouldn't be surpr

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Cid Highwind ( 9258 )
          If you don't believe me, get a 200 MHz computer, run a GTK+ 1.2 app from back then (e.g. X-chat), then run the same app that has been ported to GTK+ 2.0. You [i]will[/i] notice a difference!

          You mean there's a price to be paid for having anti-aliased text, real unicode support, and using resolution-independant vectors to draw the widgets and icons? Say it ain't so!

      • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

        by foniksonik ( 573572 )
        OS X is really really snappy with a good GPU in place. Also, try opening 5 or 6 big memory footprint apps in Windows XP and then start testing. Things slow down to a crawl, you can't even get a response from mouse clicks, and overall you just have to close some apps to continue doing anything at all... even explorer stops responding. I've tried this with a PC that had 2GB Ram a nice 256 MB GPU and plenty of HDD for VM space... still slow as it gets, to the point of unusable.

        This means that for my workflow:
        • I forgot to mention that now with Parallels I have Win XP open as well for testing in IE and FF there too.

          BTW I do all this on a MacBook Pro w/ 2GB Ram and all hooked up to a 30in. ACD (so the GPU is pretty well taxed to it's limits on rendering the screen).
        • Since moving to OSX two years ago, Ive found that its trivially easy to bring the GUI to a crawl, in most cases far worse than WindowsXP. And yet I still recommend OSX, I just dont worship it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      My guess is that part of the problem results from having so many different toolkits that must be loaded into memory from the hard drive first. I know what you mean - KDE apps under fluxbox start slow - but when one opens Firefox, Kmail, and OpenOffice one starts up what are essentially three completely different systems for rendering graphics (particularly in the case of OpenOffice).

      I can't help but believe that there is a LOT of redundant activity going on there, that could be avoided if we identify what
    • It depends very much on which applications you use. I shun Firefox, OpenOffice.org, the terminals and text editors and various other apps that ship with GNOME and KDE, as well as GNOME and KDE themselves. I use uxterm, XMMS (or mpd), mutt, elvis, mplayer, irssi, qiv, kpdf, and ratpoison, and I find them pretty speedy. GIMP starts slowly, but is ok once it's running, and I guess the configuration could be edited to prevent it from loading so many plugins.

      The one thing that is really problematic is web browsi

    • Re:Ultra fast desktop, same old slow applications (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17, 2006 @11:35AM (#16124805)

      From the slashdot submission:

      thus it is a noticeable alternative to popular desktop choices like XFCE or Fluxbox.

      This must be a definition of popular with which I am unfamilar

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MeNeXT ( 200840 )
      Wow! I have a system that triple boots, (need to run IE for testing purposes), and every time I try XP or 2000 reminds me why I like Linux and FreeBSD. It seems to take forever to start up, switching users is just not done. When the second user logs in, it seems that the system just lost half it's speed. Windows seems to have a mind of it's own, system settins reset themselves after updates, but that is another discussion of it's own...

      I prefer using the older FreeBSD system with half the processing power.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Paralizer ( 792155 )
      I have noticed GTK applications take 3-5 seconds to load, it's a bit annoying but it doesn't cost productivity.

      I've been using FVWM for about a year now, and it's absolutely amazing at creating a desktop environment that increases your productivity. Since it's so flexible, I suspect the advantages are not limited to someone who uses their desktop like I do, but for virtually anyone.

      Some of the key features that help me include
      • scrolling on a title bar shades
      • scrolling on the desktop switches to the n

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Blakey Rat ( 99501 )
        What the hell is a Quake-like console? You fire a little gun to run commands and navigate folder directories using WASD?!
        • Crystal has one built in.

          Crystal has specially configured terminal called "Quake Console". You can show or hide it by pressing Alt+` (grave). It's accessible on all desktops and can be resized, if neccessary. This "desktop recipe" is called Dock and resembles the look & feel of MacOS X Dock or XFCE panel. You can see here thumbnails of minimized windows, they are enabled in some of the recipes.

          http://fvwm-crystal.org/screenshots/quakeconsole.j pg [fvwm-crystal.org]

          It's that transparent terminal at the top. When

    • A lot of the problem can be eliminated by choosing the right apps: aterm rather than the default GNOME and KDE ones; Abiword rather than OOo.

      It is a shame, however, that the default desktop and apps that most new linux users experience are so slow.

      Seems like lost mouse-clicks and slow window redraws are a large part of the problem. Perhaps the problem lies with X...
      X is not slow. X was written to run on the machines of 25 years ago, and it's super fast on modern hardware. It's just some of the apps th

      • Back then, you had RAM running at the same speed as your CPU. You could access RAM faster than you could multiply. Nobody needed to optimize for cache locality because there wasn't any cache -- no point when RAM is as fast as the CPU.

        Back then, you didn't have very much RAM to deal with and (see above) dealing with it was cheap. Screen resolutions were small. If you had 32 kB of video RAM you were happy! CGA didn't even have that much.

        Back then, expectations were lower too.

        Now, you want to run this on moder
      • ``X is not slow.''

        Indeed, it seems that whenever someone goes and investigates this (which happens somewhat regularly), it turns out X is very capable of high performance - but it's the apps (and often the toolkits) that don't achieve that performance. Of course, another way of putting that is saying that it's too bloody hard to write an app or toolkit for X so that it performs well.

        Also, I think (but that information might be outdated) that X also does _some_ unnecessary copying of image data, which could

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by abigor ( 540274 )
      It's because X lives in userspace. If you were around in the WinNT 3.51 days, there used to be a userspace process (csrss.exe) that implemented the Windows window manager and the GDI (graphics output, basically). For NT 4.0, the window manager and GDI were moved into a portion of kernel space called the Executive, where they remain to this day. That's why Windows is so silky smooth when it comes to moving and resizing windows and overall graphical responsiveness - no userspace graphical process can compare
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • ``no userspace graphical process can compare to the priority granted to a kernel process.''

        That may be true if there's a lot of switching between kernel space and user space, but why would that be the case?

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by abigor ( 540274 )
          1. The client/server architecture of X uses sockets. In the case of Linux, domain sockets are implemented as shared memory, same as in NT 3.51 and earlier. But it's still a kernel function to manage that stuff.

          2. Context switching between applications or whatever and the X server. Context switching is handled in the kernel. A userspace switch is probably a good order of magnitude slower than a kernel switch. X generates a lot of round-trip traffic, though I guess that depends on toolkit implementers as much

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 )
            It is true that the way X and Linux work induces a lot of user-kernel switches and context switches. However, that doesn't mean that this has to be the case for any combination of kernel and graphics subsystem. I can very much imagine a system where applications acquire a piece memory to draw on, and all the display server needs to do is manage which pieces of memory go where on the graphics framebuffer (the video hardware might take care of the z-ordering) and send events. This would severely reduce the tr

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by abigor ( 540274 )
              "This would severely reduce the traffic between the clients and the server, and thus the number of switches of any kind."

              Sure, I guess so, but a switch is a switch. You could implement the same strategy in kernel space and save even more time.

              I use FreeNX for my remote desktop stuff, but I've never seen those libraries used on a local machine as a replacement for the standard X libraries when doing local work. Regardless, it would be nice to see these next-generation X libraries implement some round-trip re
    • Why are you using nautilus? Why not use something like rox-filer?
      • I only used nautilus as an example because one of the screenshots from the article shows FVWM-Crystal with a nautilus window open. While Rox is certainly feature-rich and speedy, I personally find it awkward and clunky for daily operation. My favorite "lightweight" file-browser for Linux is Thunar (although it's thumbnail previews leave something to be desired).

    • First you need to kill off nautilus. Lord only knows why anybody
      would want icons buried underneath all their apps. (or wallpaper
      for that matter -- do you run apps or do you just stare at the
      desktop and wank?)

      Depending on your system, one of these commands should kill nautilus:

      gconftool -t bool /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop -s false
      gconftool2 -t bool /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop -s false

      Next, ban all k* and q* apps. You can use the ldd command to
      see if an app is using the Qt libraries. I
      • Why stop there? Why not ditch the gnome-panels, ditch metacity, and ditch gnome-session!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by r00t ( 33219 )
          Well...

          Perhaps gnome-session is useless. I guess it saves state at logout. I think it also does the startup though, so it's probably needed for GNOME apps in general.

          Life without a window manager sucks. Metacity isn't bad. It does focus-follows-mouse (w/o autoraise of course) and generally doesn't annoy me. It's been years since I had time to waste screwing with config files. (back in 1994 I used the C preprocessor to create config files for 3 window managers on several different systems, so yes I certainly

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rs232 ( 849320 )
      "I can't quite describe the problem, but even after the tremendous improvements that have been made to the Linux desktop in the past few years, it still feels... slow"

      On this dual boot Windows/SuSE box I find Linux to be just as fast as Windows. Unlike Windows I can run an intense graphical prog in one desktop and the other is still usable. Booting Windows give the impression of being faster as the desktop appears sooner. But you have to wait until it loads its bits in the backround. I tried a few tweaks
      • [ot] I'd appreciate any tips you can give me on running a machine with low memory. My current work horse is a donated Toshiba Portege, which is ultralight, portable and just lovely, but only has 256MB RAM. I've got it running SuSE 10.0. It's got a PIII (coppermine) running at 600MHz, damnit, it should be pretty rockin', but it's SOO SLOW. I switched to Fluxbox because KDE is just unusable (although I've now switched to FVWM-Crystal, which, so far, I'm loving). I'm wondering if it's mainly disk access, since

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rs232 ( 849320 )
          "I'd appreciate any tips you can give me on running a machine with low memory. My current work horse is a donated Toshiba Portege, which is ultralight, portable and just lovely, but only has 256MB RAM."

          I basically followed lots of 'how to speed up Linux' tips on the web. A lot of which are mutually contradictory. Split the disk up into seperate partitions swap, /(boot), /(root), /usr/, /opt, and /var. Size them 2/3 times bigger that the default install size. Use the rest of the disk for /home. Put /tmp

    • FVWM with Nautilus? When I use nautilus in another environment (window manager, whatever), it always starts slower than it does in Gnome (I know, I know, preload gnome-stuff and all that, but if you have to do that, what's the point?

      fvwm-crystal doesn't require or neccesarily need nautilus. You can use rox-filer to generate desktop icons if you'd like just fine - and in fact the author reccomends that. If you can do without desktop icons altogeather, you can run it without rox-filer or Nautilus, or run on

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • ``They're far more responsive than my Pentium 4 laptop (HP XE4400) which runs linux on it's own.''

        This may indicate that your P4 laptop is getting bogged down in too many context switches. X clients tend to cause many of these: client sends request -> switch to server -> handle request -> switch to client, repeat a few hundred times and you've got the contents of one window drawn. Context switches cause quite some trashing on x86, especially on the P4 with its long pipelines (long pipeline means lo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jgrahn ( 181062 )

      I love Linux, and I wish it all the success in the world, but it just doesn't feel as snappy to me as windows 2000/XP. Seems like lost mouse-clicks and slow window redraws are a large part of the problem. Perhaps the problem lies with X, or with my own warped sense of perception... who knows?

      Seems to me it lies at your side, because lost events and slow redraw is something I experience frequently in Windows 2000, and never in Linux. And I regularly use an old 180 MHz PC with Linux.

      • Seems to me it lies at your side

        We have had quite different experiences. I have used both Windows (2000/xp), and Linux (a variety of distros) on multiple computers, from a PII with 256 mb ram to an Athlon XP 2500 with a gig of ram, and every time I have found Windows to be noticeably snappier. Applications start up faster, the windows move more smoothly, and the mouse-clicks seem more... reliable.

        I'm not trying to preach that everyone should ditch Linux and run Windows. "Genuine advantage" and DRM hassle

    • I can not get linux pass the "swirl test" on a 1.6ghz box with 512mb RAM, and a 128mb video ram. I know, that's not exactly high end, but windows passed with much lower system resources.

      By "swirl test" I mean: open a browser to full screen, open another window on top of the browser, quickly swirl the window opened on top of the browser. If I get tracing etc, it fails the test.

      NT4.0 easily passes the swirl test. Even on a 120mhz box with a 4mb video card.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crucini ( 98210 )
      It's not X - X is very fast. Firefox is definitely slow. Many people don't even notice slow-responding applications, which is one reason the problem never gets fixed.

      I think GTK is the culprit in most cases. In most GTK apps, you can see a dialog box being painted, even on 1Ghz machine. That's just inexcusable.

  • FVWM-Crystal is nice, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Darkael ( 969121 ) on Sunday September 17, 2006 @11:01AM (#16124704)

    Fvwm-Crystal is really nice, it shows how powerful and flexible Fvwm can be while still being light and fast. But its main drawback is that when something goes wrong, you are screwed unless you know Fvwm very well, and this is not something easy to achieve (for those who don't know Fvwm, just look at the man page [fvwm.org].

    Also, while we are on the subject of Fvwm, check out Metisse [insitu.lri.fr], a nice experimental Fvwm-based OpenGL desktop. I'm not sure if it's still actively maintened though. It would be a nice thing too if they ported it to Xgl.

  • Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Goaway ( 82658 ) on Sunday September 17, 2006 @11:11AM (#16124732) Homepage
    So basically "eye candy" means "skins and transparency"? That'd be pretty awesome, in 1996.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Stalyn ( 662 )
      Is the new Enlightenment out?
    • Transparency is for what exactly? Why would I want things being hard to read?

      Skins: a poor substitute for sane defaults and being able to adjust the important things.

      Many years ago, Windows 3.1 got this right. You could adjust the thickness of a window border. Today this ability is absent from the Linux desktops. You have to switch themes. Of course, at best only a few nasty-looking themes will have the thickness you want. If you want 10-pixel borders (near-blind with a 30" 2560x1600 display) you're just ou
  • I like the theme allot, I'm even downloading it now. The only downside I see is that I won't be able to put it on the Windows machine I have at work.

  • Desktop or Window Manager (Score:5, Informative)

    by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Sunday September 17, 2006 @11:54AM (#16124884)
    Last time I checked, FVWM was just a WM, and not a proper desktop as such.
    • Yes, FVWM is a window manager. However, this article is about FVWM-Crystal, which is based on FVWM, but has tweaks for so many applications that the authors have decided to brand it a desktop environment.
  • ..anything in this new one that'll compell me to upgrade?

    I've been running the same binary since about 1997, so far, I really haven't found anything it doesn't do. But it IS a little ugly.

    I didn't upgrade to FVWM-2 because its configuration files weren't compatible... How are they for 3?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by spauldo ( 118058 )
      There isn't an FVWM 3 - it's version 3 of this theme that runs on top of FVWM 2.5.

      I made the switch to FVWM 2 through a lot of other window managers. I held on to the 1.x series 'til enlightenment DR13 ( I think), then gnome/sawmill was working enough to use, then after a few years went back to FVWM. I like 2.x much better - my current config doesn't do a whole lot 1.x doesn't do, but there's a trick or two I pull that I'm pretty sure 1.x wouldn't let me get away with.

      One question though - if you're runni
      • > One question though - if you're running the same binary, is it
        > still linked with libc5, or were you an early glibc convert?

        Nah, I'm an early GNU/Solaris user. The binary was built with Solaris 2.5.1 -- and Sun is MUCH better about backwards binary compatibilty than the Linux folks...

        BTW, when I say GNU/Solaris, I really do mean that in a fairly Stallmanesque, not-tounge-in-cheek manner. I use the Solaris kernel, X server and solibs, but nearly everything else has been replaced by GNU software. It
  • It's sad when this qualifies as eye candy: http://fvwm-crystal.org/screenshots.html [fvwm-crystal.org].

    Every screenshot on that page is pretty damn ugly..

  • Where can I download those background images?

Slashdot Top Deals

I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

Close