Episode: 511
Title: HPR0511: TiT RAdio 017 - Klaatu's Window Manager Challenge
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0511/hpr0511.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 22:12:15

---

TIT radio is recorded in front of a live IRC channel.
Hello and welcome to TIT radio episode 17.
I'm Monster B and joining me tonight is Peter 64.
Good night.
Asmeth.
A good day.
J-man.
Hello.
Dan from Tilt.
Good day.
Klot 2.
Rat Poison FTW.
Word.
330.
Good day.
An art V-61.
Good evening, everybody.
The topic is Klot 2's Window Manager Challenge.
Before we start with the topic tonight, let's do our feedback and announcements.
I found that email from Deepkeek.
Remember we talked about it a couple of shows ago?
Yeah.
We've misplaced it.
I sent it to Art.
Art's going to go ahead and take care of it because it was referring to his topic he talked about.
If you have that handy art.
Yes, I do.
I'm going to go ahead with it.
Yeah, go for it.
All right.
We're referring to episode 14, I believe it was, when I discussed Axel, which was a program
to speed up downloads using multiple mirrors and for HTTP and FTP downloads and Deepkeek
sent his feedback and I'll just kind of read a little bit of it and summarize a little
bit.
Hi, guys.
First of all, I still love in your show and thanks for the kind mention of mine in HPU
R492 to 14.
I was amazed to hear of using Axel as I've reviewed a similar program called Area 2 in an
episode of Tolkien to me.
While it is true that these two programs greatly improve speed, it is useful to see why, especially
with big files, like program minaries or audio casts.
He goes on to talk about hosting big files and how unlimited bandwidth with big companies
is not an issue, but when you get people who some people still have dial up and slow
or DSL connections, this definitely speeds up the downloads and he talked about a few
other items like Metalinker, Format from Red Hat and Diadiatiati, but definitely was
a nice feedback and also just a little follow up on that.
There is a new HEPKET script for that Axel that's written by the guy, let's say a map
part now, I think was his name, and he has tweaked it a little bit and I will drop it
in the show notes as soon as I get it on the other computer.
But otherwise we want to thank DeepGeek for that response, the fact that you want to
be.
Thank you, Arch.
And then I got an email from Jonathan, I think you interviewed Jonathan Clotu on the
Bad Apples.
He's in 2, yeah, opposing us, he's in 2 I think.
And that was like 2008.
Yeah, it was a long time ago.
Well, Jonathan is a front tip radio, Lennox cranks the Bad Apples and he's launching a
computer store called Frostbite Systems and he's going to sell pre-installed Lennox
computers and they're optimized for the blind and low vision users.
You can get any distro you want, but the specialty I guess is one too with Orca screen reader
and it's configured to work right on the box and I'll put that link in the show notes
in the IRC, it's FrostbiteSystems.com.
Oh, that's who's coming on soon.
Is he?
Oh, cool.
Yeah, he's coming on soon.
Yeah, he opened that store like maybe a month too late.
My friend of mine who was blind was just looking for a computer with Lennox on it.
I set her up with Emacs speak.
I'll listen to the Bad Apples and I mentioned to Kajari because Kajari's been trying to
get that going.
So I said to have a word with you, you probably be able to help him.
Yeah, cool.
I haven't heard from him yet, but yeah, maybe he'll.
Well, that was any last night, I think those don't too bad.
Yeah, well, I wish Jonathan Locke, you know, I mean, the website looks nice, the prices
look competitive, so hopefully he does pretty good.
And I'll put the link to your interview in there too in the show notes, Kajari.
Yeah, I could be interesting to hear because he and I talk a lot about like low vision
and then Lennox usage and stuff.
So as I recall, it's a pretty good interview.
The next one is from David Abbott from Lennox crazy podcast.
He is starting a study group to learn Python and David's going to use the book Core Python
Programming by Wesley Chun for the study guide and I'll put the links in the show notes.
I can't remember the link to the study group, but it's his main website is Lennoxcrazy.com.
He had a really good episode this past week, interviewed a guy from an entrevah about
Pulse Audio and stuff.
That guy gave the best explanation of Pulse Audio I have ever heard from anyone.
It's really good.
I highly recommend people listen to it.
I'm going to be, I'll probably listen to that Monday.
Yeah.
It's fantastic.
It starts out a little bit slow, but then David asks, like, explain Pulse Audio to me and
the guy is like, okay, and he just gives a great explanation of it.
So very good.
You'll enjoy it, I think.
When I found this one the other day, it was, it's a Richard Stalman interview, Kim Hill,
a New Zealand radio host interview, Richard Stalman, and this was back in October 2009, and
it's a pretty interesting 40 minute interview.
Richard talks about 9.11 airport security, law enforcement, of course, software freedoms,
and I'll put the direct link to the download and the show notes.
I was going to throw this on HPR, but there's a copyright on it.
And you can, the only thing you can do is link to the website and the transcripts.
So I'll just put the direct link in the show notes.
It's very interesting.
And another piece of feedback is from Seeker X.
He has two questions.
First, I recall 330 talking about Freelinix help line a little bit ago, though I haven't
actually seen anything.
Holy crap.
Let me start over on that.
Somebody fell off their chair.
Yeah.
First, I like to recall 330 talking about Freelinix help line a little bit ago, though I haven't
actually seen anything new materialize.
Any news on this front?
Yeah, CyberCod and I are working on it.
We're having a little trouble with re-setting up for all of the things we were doing on
the backside to get live collars into the show and stuff like that.
But we plan to have one out as soon as possible.
Just dig the Freelinix helpline.net into your feed reader or subscribe to the Twitter or
Identica feed.
Well, everybody knows what's going on.
All right.
And the second question is, curious as to your guys impressions on a bunch of upcoming
music store, what do you guys think of that?
Any thoughts?
I would have to have known that it was going to occur before I could have had any thoughts
on it.
Can we mention it?
I thought it was a speculation.
I mean, I remember us talking about it.
I just don't think I realized.
It depends what he's talking about.
If he's talking about, personally, well, if they sell country in Western, I reckon it's
a good idea.
And if he's talking about whether we think it's a good business move for canonical, well,
I can't say it's been about it.
One is actually going to exist.
Act was talking about it on, I think, floss weekly.
John O'Neill and Leo were talking about it.
And it's going to be an MP3 store.
I was talking about it on Linux Basement, too, or what do you mean?
Yeah, we were.
Yeah, we were talking about it on Linux Basement.
So the latest version of Linux Basement, you can get more discussion on this.
But it's an MP3 only store.
And it's MP3 only because what they're buying is a connection into a service.
It's the same service that all the other major music vendors use.
So they're not actually making the deals with the record labels themselves.
But it's going to be a plug-in inside of RhythmBox.
And it's all part of the Ubuntu one thing that they're doing.
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a good idea to me, I guess.
The only problem I saw with it was that they're encouraging people to use patent-encumbered
formats.
Yeah.
And actually, this creates another question.
Is this independent?
Like, what artists are these?
Are we telling you to do and stuff?
Yeah, these are like serious, like, I hate to say top tier, but people are making a whole
heap of money.
Oh.
I'm like impressed.
It's basically iTunes for Ubuntu, I think.
But don't forget, we're talking about a company that's doing a survey and may be looking
at getting what Adobe Photoshop and that offering that for sale too, so.
Yeah.
I mean, people buy music online and I doubt that canonical really, I mean, what are they
going to do, like, change, like, make this music service or whatever, start offering
org.
I don't think that's going to happen.
So it just sounds like, yeah, they just plugged into some music service somewhere.
Well, what kind of stuff are you going to buy?
Yeah.
Like I said on Linux Basement, they kind of have to.
I mean, Ubuntu is supposed to be, you know, the Linux for human beings.
Well, human beings are buying music on, you know, inside of their music player.
Yeah.
Yeah.
People are doing this and they can't do it in Linux, but on the other hand, I think it's
another thing that Ubuntu is doing that isn't necessarily great for free software.
And, you know, kind of encourages people to not care about free software.
Yeah.
I'm sure this won't be showing up in a good news sense.
Yeah, probably not that's not something they're going to inherit.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, if you look at the two camps using Linux, there's the geeks and then there's
the Linux people and then there's, you know, the Linux people's family members and those
are the people that you just want to give Linux to and not ever have to hear them complain
about.
No, it doesn't have this.
And obviously Ubuntu is going to be the system that you do that with, you know, hand that
to your mom or whatever and just say, okay, there you go.
There's your new OS.
Now, stop bugging me.
Look, it says the thing that's really going to suck is the first time that you hand someone
in a Ubuntu CD, they go home and sell it for themselves.
They get onto the music store, you know, they buy a bunch of music, they go to play it
and it pops up in the sense that it can't and would you like to search for software to
do it?
I thought it was Ubuntu shipped with it, oh, no, I guess they don't, huh?
No, they don't.
And Chad didn't realize that either.
Like he thought that it just came with all, you know, with the MP3 codec and it does,
that's the big deal of Linux Mint.
Yeah.
So that's okay.
Okay.
And so, you know, we've been telling people, I don't know, I'm assuming we I have been
telling people on Windows for years not to download codec because it's usually not
like codec, it's a virus.
I'm sure Ubuntu is going to make it fairly friendly when it when it says I can't play
your MP3.
I mean, I would imagine that hopefully like even if we just when you buy the MP3 at all,
it should hopefully offer to install the codec or something like that, you know, something.
It doesn't, it doesn't say it has to search for software.
It tells you that you need a codec and it says you want to download this or buy the fluendo
codec.
It depends on your region.
Yeah.
I've spread and fud.
That has already.
I bet as soon as you click on the music store, it's probably going to offer you that
codec.
You have the very first time.
Yeah.
That might actually be a smart move where it pops up and says, you know, you're going
to need extra software to be able to use this, that wouldn't be too bad.
Anybody else have any more feedback or announcements?
Don't you have an announcement clock too?
No, actually I don't.
Why not?
Because this is going to air certainly not tomorrow and in the next day I'm doing the
multimedia sprint.
Well, you know what, can you just tell our live listeners what's going on?
Sure.
Hi, live listeners.
Glad to.
Tomorrow, no, Tuesday, January 26th, from 1400 Eastern Standard Times, so it's New York
City Times, until 0600 the next morning, so that's like 16 hours, me and everyone else
I can attract to help me are going to sit around and do a multimedia sprint, which was
kind of like my idea of sort of a hackathon, except without the hacking part.
Basically, it's just going out onto the internet together, sort of in a coordinated effort
and getting a whole bunch of free and open source content like font, you know, stock photos,
sound fonts, synth samples, sound effects, you know, whatever you could possibly need
to do like multimedia, creative work on Linux, download this stuff, like this raw material,
and then put them all into a big torrent file, a number of torrent files for people to be
able to download, so that when people go to do multimedia on Linux and they say, well,
gee, where's all my fancy templates and things like that that I got with my Mac, you know,
and why don't I have it here on Linux, we can say, well, actually there is a place that
you can get all this stuff, just, you know, torrent these files, and then they'll have all these
great raw materials and they can start being creative without having to go troll the internet
for five days before they can even start doing their little digital scrapbook project or whatever.
So join me, it's on the irc.binrev.net server in the channel hash media.
Cool, is this the first time you've tried to do this or?
It's the first time I've asked other people to do it with me, I actually got a month to go or so,
I spent five days going online and getting like all these sound fonts, and I downloaded like
350 of them and each of those had about probably three or four sound banks within them, so I got,
it's about 1500, you know, soft synths basically for Linux that's compatible with like
Q-synth or fluid synths, and I stuffed those into a torrent file that ended up being like 670
megabytes, so I got basically a C-s worth of, you know, little sound font files, it's going to be
great for, you know, musicians and stuff like that, so I just want to do the same thing for fonts and
textures and just, you know, everything. It caught, too, I have a question. Sure.
When we meet up on the channel, because I'd like to get involved in it, too,
when you meet up on a channel, are you going to have places for people to go, or do you,
okay, okay, and then we're going to download to a specific area, or
download to your... Yeah, actually a good, good question. There's actually this, the information
that you are asking about is online at slackermedia.info slash, I think sprint, yeah, sprint.html.
Okay, because I was a little confused on that, and so... Yeah, go to the link, go to the
how to help, I think, yeah, how to help on that page, and so it kind of gives you a rundown of
what to expect, so, but the idea will be, yeah, you download to your local machine, and then you
can zip the file and throw it, I'll have some FTP server that we can put our stuff on to,
I'll download it to my machine, and then compile it, and we're rather, you know, put it together,
and then make a torrent file out of it, and start seeding it, or if you're, you know, if the person
downloading that stuff has a complete collection that would make sense as its own torrent file,
they can certainly do that themselves as well, but I'm definitely willing to be the initial
cedar and everything. Okay, yeah, because I got, like, probably 200 giga hard space, I can,
you know, just download to my hard to content. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, and I always,
I always got a couple computers running, so even if I'm not, I mean, if you give me a spot to
download a pile of stuff, I'll just let it rip, you know. Yeah. All right, you guys, ready to get
on to the main topic? We are. Now, what, what did you want us to do, Clotter, just to like a
little recap? Okay, last time, let's hit radio. I suggested that we switch window managers from our
usual comfortable environment to something not so comfortable. And preferably, I was thinking
something a lot less, you know, something kind of obscure, just to make it a little bit different,
because I was listening to TuX radar, and then log radio, I know you used to do this as well,
I think, for them, you know, the whole gang would switch from their usual canome to the exciting
world of KDE, and then they would spend like a whole episode complaining how KDE isn't any good,
and how they couldn't stand it, you know. And then one guy would oblicatorally say, oh well,
I'm kind of a KDE guy, I kind of like it except I hate KDE for something like that. So, I don't
know, I mean, that kind of gets silly after a while, because I mean, big deal, get on to KDE,
let's do something really crazy and go, you know, from KDE to crack poison or something like that.
So that was the idea, and I just thought maybe we could, especially if we're doing obscure ones,
we could kind of give listeners an idea of what it is like to live in that environment, you know,
how well does it fit your workflow, just stuff like that. If you liked it, if you don't like it,
if you're going to stay with it, you're not going to stay with it. Yeah, you should have seen all
the belly aching that was going on in the IRC channel, like a day after you announced that.
It was ridiculous. People complaining and... Yeah, right after you announced it.
Wow. You should have heard about we were calling you a clap, too, lucky you and people to cry.
Well, you know, I mean, we are geeks, right? I mean, we should be able to handle a little bit of a change
of window managing environment. You know, it's cheap, and just, I mean, as long as you bring up
the new window manager, I mean, as long as you got a command line, if you can get that open,
you're pretty much good to go, and theory. Now, this guy didn't belly ach too much, but let's start
off with Peter 64. Oh, she's nervous, yeah. Well, I'm not really into the fully bland desktop
environment. Like, I haven't been for a while. I don't know how obscure the one I chose was,
but I sort of like my, my desk or window manager to be, well, like my women, I suppose,
like fast and small, slim, modest, dynamic. So I went for the, I went for the awesome
window manager, which is, for those who don't know, it's just a tiling window manager.
Now, it's a dynamically tiling window manager. I think we're going to hear about a couple of
main tiling window managers later. But, and, and I must admit, the first hour I went over to it,
I, I was a little bit frustrated, purely because you don't get, well, the only thing in the menu
was to shut the thing down or open the terminal. So first of all, I had to start everything from the,
from the terminal, which is a great, sorry. Where's the menu? Is that something you just like
right click on or something? Yeah, you're just right clicking and you get, I think, about three
options. So, and that was the other problem I had. My bloody, for some reason, X term would open,
it was using a white background with bloody white text. Right, and trust me, that's not fun when
you've got about 14 X terms open. And you don't know what's in half of them, then you close them
down and you realize you killed conversation while you're talking to ads. So that's something
you did anyway. But, um, awesome is written in C and uses the lure, I think, programming language
for, like, to make it more extensible, they only just changed over to that in version three.
Prior to that, version two, I don't know what they used. Now, it's all done through one file,
a total configuration, that's to set up, you know, your menus, your hot keys, etc. Now,
if you had no idea with, with lure, you would be very comfortable. I, I certainly am not. So,
I had to do a hell of a lot of reading and get a lot of people's configuration files,
go through it and try to work out firstly to set up a menu. And I've never worried about that
in Fluxbox before, but I thought I'll set the menu up this time and have a look at that.
And I left it about a week before I configured my hot keys. Now, and that was one of the frustrating
things. I kept hitting keyboard shortcuts that didn't work, okay, because I've been using
Fluxbox for 12 months. Now, how do I went to the trouble and set up the hot keys first,
then my frustration would end very quickly. Once I set it up and got the hot keys set up exactly
the same way as in Fluxbox, it, it really became a PC-Caked Operate. I really enjoy the way it,
has pre-configured layouts that are quite easily to tab through. You can really use awesome,
and I think this is one of the reasons I was developed, is you can use it without even touching
a mouse. It is very, very fast once you get to hang of it. And honestly, I, I have said goodbye
in Fluxbox now. I'm that impressed with Awesome. I will just stick with Awesome. I've now got it on
all three systems. It's very impressive. But the config file is literally, it's not a plain
text file, it's in Lua. Yeah, it's written in this Lua, which is, it's still, I mean, it's still
obviously human readable text, but it's got a hell of a lot of commas and colons and brackets and
yeah, it, you need to spend time. And the other thing was a bit frustrating. Like I said, I would
get people's configuration files and read through it and try to figure out how to set up menus
and short cut keys, etc. One of the problems I had a lot was all those starting applications. I
like to have conversation opens, a couple of terminals open, etc. on certain screens. It uses,
I use nine workspaces now, which just happens to be the default, but it's surprising how quickly
you start to use them. And I got certain configuration files and went through and found out where,
where this was happening and copied it. I need to find out that one was bloody wrong. And there's
a lot of frustration. It's been a hell of a lot of time doing that. And unfortunately, it's
much as I hate to say that I asked the J-Mint where I was going wrong. Did you read a manual?
No, I'm bloody, you should, but the other thing too, like I said, it's fully customizable,
fully extensible. All the widgets and everything, they're just amazing. I haven't got into that yet.
It's something I will have a play with. It's not something I'll ever use, but I'd still like to
learn a little bit more about getting these widgets going. Yeah, very impressive. And
that's the point I just asked you for. Yep. Does awesome, does it relegate different applications,
different screens automatically? Is it one of those? No, it's the same screen,
where we'll allow multiple applications per screen. No, no, you can, that's the way I've
said it up now, but originally, if you're on screen, I'll take a couple of things to,
no, if you're on screen one, it would open them up, but it would automatically tile them for you.
But there's some things like, say, the GIMP, where you need floating windows. You can go in
and into your, uh, lua, rc.luo file and tell it that this particular application, like, say,
him player or the GIMP should be automatically setting a floating mode. So then you can hold
in your mod 2nd drag and set it out the way you want it. But a couple of things talking about
screens. Say I open conversation on screen two, then I decide I want to flip that over to five.
When I get a closer on screen five, the notification box that pops up to say, do you really want
a quick conversation? We'll pop up on the original screen. Now at first, I thought I'm closing this
wrong. You know, like, I didn't know that that box had popped up and then you think conversation
had frozen, but it was waiting for me to click on that notification box, you know what I mean.
So that was one, one annoyance until I got used to that. And the only other annoyance that I
came across was once again, I noticed a conversation, mostly because the tabs are at the very bottom.
On occasion, it would put, if you had three applications open, saying the right hand pain,
three down, it would push the very bottom one off the screen a little bit and I'd lose the tabs
in conversation. On most windows, that doesn't really matter because there's nothing written
at the very bottom of them. I'd recommend anyone who doesn't want to spend a little bit of time
to have a look at awesome, because it is bloody awesome. And you're not using a panel with it,
right? Or do you say you were? Panel. As in the top taskbar, Dennis, what's your name?
Yeah. Are you using just that or anything else?
No, that's all I've got to say, top taskbar, whatever they call it, that,
a, a, a, my name has the clock in it. That's where you can install these widgets too.
That like I said, I, I had a quick look at them. I tried to get them going, but it's
something I need to spend more time with. The screen shots, I think, for most of our desktops
on Unix porn now, if, if you want to get over and have a look what we're playing with.
When you don't have anything like any windows, if you close all your applications,
what's on the desktop? Is it just a blank desktop?
Yeah, black, yeah, just a blank screen. Can you like an image on there or no?
Yeah, you can, yeah, originally it comes set out with an awesome wallpaper, but yeah,
so it's replaced your flux box?
Definitely, yeah, I, I think it took me probably a week.
Once I'd used this for a week, I think by then I was saying that I would never go back to
flux box. Like, honestly, what it is to me now, because I've couldn't figure it in such
a way that it mimics my original flux box, it's just a nice tidy flux box. It's just automatically
places, instead of me dragging the windows around and getting them adjusted, like in, uh, in
flux box like I'd have to, this doesn't automatically for me. Like, admittedly, too, that I,
if you're a smarter bloke than me and worked on computers all day, you, you could do a
hell of a lot more, uh, with awesome than I ever intend to. I mean, if you gather and read what
you can do with that lure, I'm excited, I think I'm going to trade out.
Honestly, Dan, you won't be disappointed. I better not be, or I'm coming after.
I'd, I'd say what, if, if you are, I'll personally get me a plan of flight of your ass and I'll
put you all one back the way it was. All right, I'm going to hold you to it.
So we got two thumbs up? Definitely. All right. Let's see if we can keep this, uh, this record going.
Let's, let's go, let's move on to asthma. Oh, you want a thumbs up record?
Yeah, go under the wrong bike.
So what do you do about it? You better go to somebody else next then. Now, I, uh, I, I chose, uh,
window maker and, uh, awesome choice. Hey, yeah, right. No, I never subordinate my life.
It works. That's that much I'll say for it. You can make a usable system out of it, but it's
boring. The icons are boring. Everything's square. It's, I, I did not like it. I played with it
and read docs on it for three, four days. And that was all I could take. I, you know, I was,
I was ready for the booby edge. And, uh, so I promptly went back to XFCE and, uh,
calm my nerves down and, uh, stayed with it for, uh, for a few days. And, uh,
then I decided, well, am I as well try something I haven't tried before. So, uh, I, uh, I put, uh,
KDE on, uh, on top of arch and I was pleasantly surprised, uh, that, uh, it worked on the old
equipment that I put it on. It turned out to be a lot lighter than, uh, then I was expecting.
And, uh, you know, I'm going to play with it for a while, but, uh, I, I won't waste any more time
on Windows Maker. Well, okay. So, did you try to, I mean, so one of your compliances that it was
square or whatever, did you look on boxlook.org or anything for like themes and stuff to see if you could
spruce it up a bit? I don't, I don't much worry about how a desktop looks. Functionality is more
important to me. And it just didn't have the functionality. It just wasn't. It, it was not a
comfortable place to be. Uh, I used too many, uh, window managers that, that were so much better
that, uh, I couldn't spend that much time with it. I just couldn't force myself to do it.
About to to answer your question, um, I would say I don't ever recall seeing any theme or anything
that provided, uh, non-boxed applets, uh, doc apps or anything like that. They've always been
box, I mean, you could probably cobble together a theme with customized colors to make those boxes
not look like boxes, but they would still essentially be a square on there with just a graphical
texture on them that might attempt to look at something different. I say, I remember I seem to
remember seeing like some pretty cool looking, uh, window maker themes, but, but I could be wrong.
It's not that hard to make a window maker thing. I did a GI Joe one and I did a Godzilla one
and they were up on team.org, but this is going back with nine or 10 years ago. It's probably been
that long. Yeah. And, uh, development, uh, that's, that's what window maker looked like about nine
or 10 years old. Well, yeah, I don't think I don't think they've been pushing anything to
be in a better way. They talked about picking it back up about a year and a half to years ago,
I have not seen anything in like five years. And has anyone tried, um, afterstep then, because
isn't that somewhat related to window maker or something or, or no? Afterstep and GNU step,
window makers bailed off of GNU step. I've tried it. It's very similar to window maker,
but it's even, uh, I think, even a little, okay. But what do you need out of a window manager?
Really? I mean, come on. What are you looking for? You just need something to watch your apps, right?
Well, that's the same cloud two I reckon. Uh, when there's managers, it should be transparent.
You shouldn't even notice it after, you know, get used to it. You shouldn't even think about it.
I don't reckon some people are supposed to like the eye candy in that, uh, no.
What's the other two? Clat two. So what if asthma didn't like it? I'm just curious is like why
I didn't like it exactly? Because I know I was boring, but what do you mean boring? It's
square. No matter what you do with it, it doesn't really change. It's still the same boring
window manager. Uh, so it's not, it's not terribly configurable? Uh, not as much as a lot of them
I've been in. Yeah. I, I mean, you know, I, I like flux box better. I like ice window manager
better. I like, uh, well, I, I like all the window managers better, but, you know, I've,
been open box. I've tried and, uh, JWM and, uh, you know, they, they all had a better
feel to them than, than this thing did. Yeah. Well, that's a good point that, that's not configurable
because now that you mention it, I don't recall ever seeing screenshots of window maker where
it's been drastically different than any, you know, except in like, sort of like color scheme.
Or, you know, yeah, you can change the color screens and you can, you can move the,
where the icons go and, uh, move the, the, no, it doesn't have a bar in it, but, uh, you can move
everything around on it, but it's still the same, it's still the same thing when you get through,
it just placed a little different. Yeah. Yeah. And it seems like, I mean, I've seen screenshots of,
like, flux box and, and open box, or even KDE where, where you're just, you look at it and you're
just like, that doesn't look at all, like the other screenshots I've seen of that. Yeah. You know,
it's like so configurable. Well, I, you know what, I'm wondering what you're talking about there
because I found window maker to be very configurable because I configured window maker to look exactly
like my flux box, just like I configured KDE to look exactly like my flux box. All right.
You just like, why am I not just using a flux box? I mean, you, you, you were able to get rid of like
the dock and stuff like that, like that. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, the dock. Yeah, definitely. And
what about the, the widget or whatever, you know, like the actual, you can turn those on and off.
You don't have to have them on there at all. Yeah. You could, you can do all that, but you still,
you still got window maker when you get through. Can you have like an XFCE dock,
for instance, or panel running on top of window maker, for instance? No, I didn't. I was just
in XFCE terminal with it, which I like because of the transparency. You can go with that terminal.
And, you know, you just hang your text out there in thin air, which was, which was kind of fun,
but that, that was the extent of it. You, you could, if you wanted to, but window maker uses dock apps
and certain applications like, it's been a long time since I've actually tried to do this,
but you can take some applications and, and mash them into a dock app structure and
quantify it. So if you needed something like a, maybe Wicked might be able to do this or like
an applet, you would click on it to iconify it and it would create a pseudo dock app out of it.
So you, you window maker uses dock apps as opposed to panels. Okay. Yeah. Well, I, I, I,
I did that with, you know, some of the things I would use it, but, and a lot of bars, dock apps,
but WM weather on it, you know, which is a nice little app that I've used on fluxbox before,
but I don't know. It's, I can't explain it. It just never had the right feel for me.
I would say window maker does have its own unique style. And if you, and you write their
asthma to a certain degree that no matter what you do to it, it's still window maker. That's,
that's where I was coming from. Yeah. That sounds kind of vaguely familiar. I mean,
I've used it before. I think now that you mention it, that does sound about right for it. It doesn't,
it doesn't feel as flexible as, as other ones I've used. But it is usable. You can, you can set up
and, and run, run it as a window manager and, and you can probably do about everything you want to
do with it. But it never, never has that right feel. It never just clicks. But that's just my opinion.
So, uh, two thumbs down? Uh, yeah, probably. That, that, that's maybe a little more unkind
than what I really want to go for it. Like I say, it, it, it is usable. If you've got the right
temperament for it, uh, maybe it's just what you're looking for. But if that's the case,
you probably don't have a life anyway. So go ahead and use it.
All right. Thanks for being honest, asthma. What's, uh, what, what did you, uh, trade out,
too? Rat poison. And, uh, it was fantastic. It's a really, really cool little window manager.
And it, it sounds a lot like awesome, actually. Um, the idea is that you start rat poison and
you're dumped into basically a blank screen with maybe a little text message up on the upper right
hand corner that says like, welcome to rat poison or something like that. And first thing you have
to do is hit control T, which is the, uh, kind of the command key binding for rat poison.
So you hit control T and then the C key to create a new, um, a new terminal basically or a new,
you know, a new window. So then you're dumped onto a command line and you can do whatever you want.
Like, um, start, uh, start an application if you want to. So I think normally, you know,
you might want to start, let's say Firefox. So you can type in Firefox and it will launch Firefox,
full screen, uh, just right there in front of you and you can start using it. So there's no window
border or anything. It's basically just full screen. Everything starts full screen. So like even,
if if I start dolphin for a graphical file managing experience, it's going to be full screen.
So, um, if you want to switch to the next, to a new terminal to start a different application
or whatever, you can hit control T and C to create a new space and, uh, you know, start another
application. Um, so it's a lot, I mean, it feels a lot like a new screen actually. It feels exactly
like a new screen to me except that it's got the added benefit of having, uh, X, you know. So,
I mean, I guess you could run a new screen in X as well and kind of have a similar thing. But,
but it's, you know, you hit that escape sequence, control T and then whatever, uh, and then you,
you launch your applications and then you can switch back and forth between the applications with
control T in to go to the next or the P to go to the previous. And that's the basics of it.
And of course, there's a lot more you can do with it in terms of, I guess, I guess what you'd
call tiling. They call it splitting, splitting up frames and you can go in and, and hit control T,
S to split the frame or capital S to split the frame vertically. Or maybe I have that backwards,
I forget. But, uh, and that splits the frame and then you can control T tab over into whatever
different frame on that screen that you've got and, and launch different applications within that,
that, that frame. And you can resize them with control T R, uh, and you can actually even,
I mean, you can like resize it, you know, you can hit control T R and then the arrow keys and it'll
resize the frame so that you can really get it down to just exactly the sizes that you want. So,
it's, um, it's, it's fairly flexible. Quite a lot. In awesome, there's preconfigured layouts.
With rat poison, if you get a layout, can you save that and return to a layout with, yeah, you can,
you can, uh, I don't remember the command off hand because it's not something that you do,
you know, you do it like once or twice and then you don't do it anymore. But, yeah, there's a,
there's a couple of different commands like that rat poison allows you to issue and one of them
is to save a, uh, a, I guess a frame layout that you can then reload. And you can also set things
to not be managed, you know, like if you need, if there are exceptions and there are exceptions,
against being these really big notable ones for me, um, where you can, you can kind of take that
out of rat poison control. Um, and it, it does something interesting with dialogue boxes too. Like,
if you find, if, if, let's say I'm in Firefox and I, I tell Firefox to quid or something,
it, you know, how it pops up and says you want to save this session, you know, to, to, to,
to the next time you open it, it brings up all your websites. Um, so little pop up things like that,
they actually don't come up like full screen. They just, they just pop up in the middle of your
current screen without any window decoration or anything, but, but it is like a floating. It feels,
it looks and feels like a floating dialogue box. It's not like full screen or anything like that.
So there, there are a couple of exceptions to the way it handles things. And I, I guess I've
installed it on three different systems now. So it's, it's on my Slackware laptop and, and that,
when I launch it, it's pretty plain. It's just like black screen and then you hit Controls, TC,
and you get a white terminal, uh, with black text. I installed it on Fedora and that one's
really nice when you, it, it, it logs itself into the KDM session, uh, you know, your login,
KDM thing. So when you log in, you can, you can say, okay, no, log into rat poison rather than KDE.
And, um, and it comes up with your, with the default Fedora background image in the background. So,
you know, it feels very integrated. I like that one a lot. That was a really good instance of it.
And then I've installed it on Ubuntu or, and I think they didn't, I want to say they didn't have it
in their repository. It could be wrong. But, um, that wasn't terribly well integrated. It didn't,
it didn't log itself into GDM and, uh, it didn't have anything. I might have just had to,
I think I might have done that one from source and that's probably why that would make sense,
but it didn't log into GDM. But, um, but yeah, it, it's nice all around. I, I, I was, I'm really
digging it. And like Peter 64, it kind of, it almost mimics the way I use Flux, uh, Flux box,
to be honest, um, except without the, I guess without the, the bother of having to drag all my windows
around and kind of, you know, pile my workspace like I guess one normally might do. If you,
if you like using Gnews screen in the terminal, you will, I think you would, one would like,
rat poison. I, that's, that's my feeling. So it's all key bindings. You don't use a mouse?
No, not at all. You do not need a mouse. It's incredible. I mean, it's unbelievable. But again,
I mean, that's kind of how I, I used Flux box anyway. I, you know, I mean, you've got everything
that you actually use in a key binding and, and ideally, yeah, you don't really have to use a mouse
all that much, but, but it feels a little bit more pure with, with rat poison because it's designed
that way. That's, you know, it's got all these commands kind of built in and stuff like that.
Does it use like workspices as well? Or, no, not, I mean, sort of, I mean, the control T C kind of
creates, I guess, what I would, I think it sounds like. Yeah, that's what it sounds like a workspace
is. And you can group certain applications together so that they kind of become a workspace,
I think. I never really bothered doing that. I just, I would set my, I would split the frames,
and then I would control T in to another workspace and have a different set of frames in there.
Enough kind of how I used it. And a lot of the applications, to be honest, I just used full
screen because I was really using this primarily at work, and, and I'm just living in, like,
Emacs and a terminal and Firefox, so I just kept going back and forth between those three applications.
So I didn't even, I didn't really have to split frame all that much. I did it at home for stuff
that I would do here, but, but, you know, I think a lot of my rules really just using full screen,
which, I mean, you know, which, I mean, if you think about, like, Moblin and, and some of these
weird sort of net, net book remix stuff, I mean, that's kind of what they are pushing on net books
anyway. So having rat poison on my triple EPC and Fedora kind of, like, felt really normal, you
know, because everything comes up full screen by default anyway. It's like the perfect net book,
window manager, I think, in a way. Is it going to be a cable?
Oh, yeah. I don't, I'm like, I would be, I can't quite imagine having a computer without
poison installed on it at this point. I mean, it's such a, so tiny. I mean, if you go to
nonganew.org slash rat poison, that's the website. It's got to be, it's less than a megabyte,
you know, download. It's so fast because it doesn't have anything. I mean, there's just, it's,
you know, what is it? It's like the next session without any window decoration, without any
annals or applets or docklets or widgets, you know, it's just, it's x and you just launch your
apps. It's really nice. Yeah, I actually mentioned that I'd probably
will stick with awesome and I will. The only thing that could maybe change my mind is,
they did a big change from two to three where they went to this lure challenge. You previously,
do you know what they used? It was a very simple configuration file. There was no programming
language. It was just some brackets that determined where it stopped. Yeah, and from what I read,
a lot of people got upset because they had it all set out of the way. They wanted all of the
sudden. They couldn't copy their configuration and everything like that. I think if they went
through a big change like that again, it would probably make me think, and I'm not sure how often
they do it, or maybe I'd start looking at something else because I haven't got that sort of time
to go through that every six months. You know what I mean? Yeah, there are a little problems where
they move to a new major version and then they'll put up a list of changes that you need to put in
your config file. Well, that could be the only showstopper for me, I think. But it seems to me that
there's a lure that they've chosen is extremely powerful language. But once again, I don't know
when you think about that sort of stuff. It's just broadly what I'd sort of read.
And that probably wasn't a scripting language for some kind of popular video game, too.
That's what James mentioned that before. Yeah, I know I've seen that on the cover of a book
somewhere, I just can't remember. Yeah, but the language is so light that it's used pretty much all
over game development. Oh, okay, interesting. I mean, Rat poison doesn't always fit my workflow,
but when it does, it fits it really, really well. It just so, I mean, I imagine I will be splitting
my time between Rat poison and KDE fairly frequently. No, what can't you do on it that you would
have to go back to KDE for? I can't, I don't know. I can't look at the prettiness of KDE
among Rat poison. I agree. No, but I mean, just some of the, I don't know, like, especially with Gimp,
and when I'm just, if I'm doing, like, if I'm editing in Blender, I don't know, my works,
the way that I, you know, the things that I have open, like the different windows that I have open
in the background of Blender. I mean, not Blender windows, but like, you know, I'll have a
dolphin window open, and maybe a media player open. I don't know, it's just, I'm kind of, like,
locked into that way of working with traditionally, traditional window manager, so I don't see
myself switching over to that. It's switching to Rat poison for that kind of work anytime soon.
All right, so that's a two thumbs up. Yeah, for sure. All right. What did you try,
on GMM? Something similar, right? To my point? Yeah. At the apologize, it's going to be a little
similar to Clat Hues review, because I have some previous experience with the Tiling Window Managers.
I've used awesome an X-Mone app for a while, but I've been wanting to try out something called
Stump WM, and after a couple of days of using it, I looked into the background of it, and it's
actually Rat poison rewritten in Common List. It's done by the same author, and basically,
in the background page, they say that Stump WM is what they really wanted to create.
Starting it, I tried their old version, the one that they didn't even like.
Well, yeah, well, you can see that they really liked designing it from the start, but the way
the development turned, they started adding a subset of lists into the Window Manager, so then
eventually they got sick of it and said, well, let's just rewrite the whole thing. So the key
configuration is pretty much the same. As was previously mentioned, this all works kind of in sync
together. You know, you have the EMAX modifier is Control X, the screen modifier is Control A,
and Stumps is Control T. So you get kind of this harmony going on, especially if you use EMAX
and screen already, which I do. Being written in Lisp has gotten quite a lot more configuration
possibilities because of Lisp behind it. The configuration file is all in Lisp, so it helps if
you're going through the whole configuring EMAX thing, and you already have some Lisp going into
your head, you know. Maybe you don't want to learn it just for nothing. But you have the same
group concept, you know, Control T and in your F keys move around to different groups. You can
move all the windows around the keyboard. It handles dual screens very well. I've plugged
in a monitor to my laptop, and I also have dual screen on the desktop, and everything works very
smoothly. It pretty much just works. Have you had any experience with like the, like again,
or something like that, where multiple windows for one application? Yeah, it's the same concept
used to rat poison. You would want to probably do a layout and save that layout so that it can
reload it. Yeah. But the wiki has all the configuration explained, so the Lisp is not that hard
to tackle when you're doing your .stump WMRC file. Panels are okay, kicker, unknown panel,
all that. The windows resize to fit the panel on the screen, and the pager works with flipping
desks. There's a ton of example code on the wiki. It really is impressive. It's a really
awesome window manager to geek out on, because you can do things like connect EMAX through the
slime layer to the window manager itself. So you can have EMAX manipulate the properties of
the window manager. That's cool. So how much Lisp do you have to know to like configure this thing?
Well, it depends on how much you're going to configure. You can get by with not knowing anything,
just copy and pasting other people's code, but you would probably want to be learning EMAX
and how to configure EMAX and getting into that whole Lisp thing, because that's where the power
really is when you know exactly what it's doing. It has a stumpwm.ntdisktop.net.
It has a mode line that is hidden by default. They have little variables that you can put in
that list, the window list, and the desktop list. You can toggle that on or off if you want to use
that instead of the panel. But like I said, through EMAX, you can have it manipulate different
things and put it in the mode line. So are you going to continue to use it after this?
Yeah, I definitely, I'm going to stick with this and probably learn quite a bit of Lisp as I go on.
So I'm going to say you're going to give it two thumbs up then. Oh yeah, all right.
I don't know, I might try that one now, knowing that that's the new improved version of Rapply.
All right, let's move on to 330.
All righty, well, I used SVWM after trying to get Rock's desktop installed, which ended horribly.
Still not sure how J1's got it installed, but Class 2 and I will take it first time.
Talk about five minutes to do. I didn't say that in the last tip, and I thought I'm going
to try this, and five minutes later, I haven't installed enough. Can't be that hard.
If I would not, anyone can do it.
The clock here, then I couldn't get it to work. It's either that when we tried it, you know,
whatever service needed to run to download the components wasn't working because I remember
there's being some weird little installer program, or you guys both did it on RH and me in 330,
we were trying to do it from, you know, I think from whatever installer they have on Fedora,
and it just wasn't working.
Oh, I did on that. That's true.
So I failed miserably at that, and then decided I'd try J1 and got it compiled and running,
but couldn't get any of the menu working, and knowing the two weeks that were to come,
I decided that having to get just the menu to be able to open a terminal running probably was
not going to be good. So I was doubt kind of, and installed FVWM, which it actually kind of
nice. I didn't do, I didn't stray too far from the regular default configuration, even though
it's a really ugly in pink. It looks like someone threw up up to a bit small, but if you go to
UnixPorn.com, all of my horribly pink desktop are up there, and I think really the only thing I
changed was I needed a place to dock a bunch of the applets that I used for network manager and
stuff like that. So I did run Gnome panel with just the notification area, and I turned off
the desktop paging because I don't use more than one desktop in any window manager, so that was
really starting to kind of piss me off, because if you drug something just a little too far to a
corner, because you had desktops that were above, no, you had ones that were below to the
caddy corner and to the right, and so I would drag a window a little too far and have no idea where
it went until I went digging through all the desktops, and I turned off the sloppy window focus
because it just confused me to no end. But other than that, it was really cool. It does this thing
when you minimize an app, it just drops it down to the bottom and makes this huge,
kind of cool looking icon, but it's huge. For some reason, I just thought that was really,
really cool. I'm going to stole a nail. There's a big icon down the bottom.
Yeah, isn't that what Puppy runs on? I have no idea. I've never used Puppy.
How do you get the Gnome panel to run on that 330? Is that something you can configure?
It was actually really, really easy. When you open the panel, not the panel, but the menu first
collecting your app by just primary clicking, just your left click, and it was in my, I'm trying to
get to my screen, shall we actually add that showing, but it was just in one of the menus.
Okay. It just the panel. I was like, I didn't know it was Gnome panel at first. I was like,
oh, look a panel. I opened it and actually the regular default Gnome panel opened. I was like,
oh, okay, I'll just remove all the Gnome stuff from it and stick it off to the side. It was in the
accessories menu. Oh, I see. So that thing on the right hand side, I see it. I didn't even notice,
I didn't even realize that's what that was. Yeah, I just typed it off to the side.
Okay, interesting. Yeah. I know that's kind of cheating, but I needed a place to dock things and
didn't have enough battery life on the laptop I was using to be doing research on the road.
Yeah, yeah. No, it looks pretty cool and it's cool that, I don't know, it always interests me as to
which window managers kind of encourage, like, you know, peace-mealing your environment together
as it were. You know, like Fluxbox for me is the same way. It's like running Fluxbox, but you've got
the, you know, I don't know, KDE, like a, you know, Clipper and K-Mix and things like that up in
the corner or whatever. Yeah, it's saying if you go to the screen shots on fbwm.org,
but there are people doing really, really cool stuff with it. Oh, yeah. But I think these people,
I know these people spend a whole lot more time on it than I did. Right, right. I got it just
running enough to be, you know, to be useful and then didn't mess with it because, hey, it was
useful. Yeah. You know, and break things that aren't broken. And so is it all pretty much based
around like a menu structure kind of like, I don't know, Fluxbox kind of, you know, you right-click
and you get that big window. Yeah, it really kind of was. Like, I never did find a way to just,
like, I didn't actually look at the game too file. I'll admit now because it all kind of worked.
So I was like, oh, all right, I won't, that's a good big ball. Okay, I got really, really lazy when
it all kind of works the way I would have had it work out of the box. Right. But I really, at one
point, just added the launcher applet for GNOME. You have the run applet and just put it up there
for things I didn't want to dig for and knew what I was opening. Oh, okay. So you actually had like a,
you're talking about that thing where you just kind of type in the name of the application
and it like, well, yeah, they just, yeah, it just fires up. You have a screenshot of that one?
It's in some of the screenshots. Okay, I'll keep looking. I mean, it's just a little, I don't
have the actual, it's the default GNOME run dialogue. But there's just a little, a little button
in the top corner. Okay, okay, I get it. Because I was tired of digging for evolution over and over.
Right. Okay. Because I always think that it should be in internet and it's always in office.
Well, is there something that you can, is there a key binding that you can press to make that
run command thing come, you know, or just appear for you? But yeah, that was the default ones that
I tried without going into the, without, you know, actually doing any research. It didn't work.
But I'm sure that you can get it to work. I was just lazy and reoccupied.
But yeah, it wasn't terrible. I don't know what, for the love radio guys and all them
complained about. I mean, I used the same apps I always do. It was just, everything was pink around
it. And all the pink is just default? Yeah, that's the default. How can you change it? There's no
easy configuration tool to change the theme. No, it wasn't, it wasn't something that immediately
stuck out to me. Yeah, I hate to say this is the worst, the worst review ever. But, no, I mean,
so how long did you use it, like, for two, about two weeks? Yeah, I used it the entire two weeks.
I mean, I don't know. And you don't have any major complaints. I'd say that was kind of,
not really. I mean, it was just like using any other window manager.
It does look like they've got quite a few themes that you can download from FVWN.
And it doesn't sound all that hard to install. And some of these screenshots on FVWN are pretty
nice. So, yeah, it almost seems like something to check out. I never really gave it much thought.
I might actually give it a second round and try to turn it into something special.
So, yeah, I mean, if I was stuck in it for, you know, six months to a year, I wouldn't complain.
Okay, so that's the commitment you're going to use it for the next year. Okay, fantastic. Good
to hear it. Very brave of you, 330. I like if KDE and Genome and OpenBox and all those just
didn't exist anymore. I can run this without a tear. But I still do prefer the other ones that I'm
used to. It was like a one thumb up, one thumb down to me. So, if a developer listened to this,
he would, he would probably say, well, if the guy was stuck in it, he would use it.
If there are any developers listening, I am going to give it another go. I'll give it a real
proper one. And I will post screenshots of that. Okay, we'll be waiting for him.
So, I think this whole thing is going to just end up driving way more traffic to Unixplorn
than Kot-21. Now, this whole thing was just a scheme to get people to post stuff on Unixplorn.
Bit self-serving there, huh? Not a bit. I've got a big marketing deal with a major
screenshot vendor, I don't know. I think this did, at some point, kind of break uploading
to Unixplorn, at least for me. I got another little trick. I remember you. Yeah, it's an upload
for three of the days. Yeah, that is weird. And next challenge should be an OS challenge,
a Distraved Challenge. I think we all distro hop enough, well, not all of us, but we don't
we all kind of distro hop enough. I guess we could do it, but I think Peter just wants us all to use
Sousa. Yeah, I think Hannah Montana for it. Oh, I just was looking for excuse to
go back to Hannah Montana Linux, that was all. All right, so we got one thumbs up for your review.
That was FVWM. What does that stand for? Well, it's a VIN Windows Manager. No, it's the F Virtual
Window Manager, I think. That's what, when you're installing a flag where it offers to do FVWM,
and it's like F question mark and virtual window manager or something like that. I think no one
knows what the F stands for or something, something weird like that. That's, it's an auction and
slack way. I've never read that. Yeah, it's about to take an armpit. Yeah, really. No, I mean,
it's an option there and it always, they, they seem unclear on what the F stands for.
I always hope that was kind of an easy. Well, I'm going to say it stands for friggin' awesome.
You just put shit on it for bloody happening. Well, I have to put shit on everything,
you know. Just because I said it's unusable and terrible and the people that wrote it to be shot
doesn't mean it's not great. I don't know. I mean, I don't think his, his review is as bad as
the ads of us for a window maker. Yeah. I mean, it's actually pretty fairly positive, I felt.
But I didn't say that I only gave it a half-asseted attempt. Yeah, but you know what? The
window maker project is probably dead. So nobody could come after asthma.
Well, it's dead now if anybody listens to this. Let's move on to Dan. What do you got for us, Dan?
Well, Monster Bay, let me tell you what I have for you tonight. I was compelled by reading 330
blogs, take part in this little venture of yours and give E-17 enlightenment 17 another world.
It's been a couple years since I used it as a main desktop for a little while and I primarily
use flux box. I'm just about every system I run on a regular basis and I figured I'd
switch my arch box and my main workstation over to E-17. E-17 is, it's counted to be a very
artistic and elegant and aesthetically pleasing window manager. It is built on a core set of
libraries that, like KDE, all begins with K, their libraries all begin with E and they
work pretty tightly together to provide a very flexible and interesting environment.
In light, E-17 has been ported over to not only Linux and pre-BSD, but it'll also run on Windows
CE, I believe, and OS 10 and for I'm using it for some smartphones. I forget which company is
using E-17 and is it Samsung? Or is it Nokia? I forget which one is using in light minute 17.
It's been a long time in development about 10 years if I'm not mistaken and you can see that
they do have a direction and they're moving forward. I'll be at a somewhat slower pace than a lot
of other software applications. When I first tried E-17 for the tech show when we interviewed
the developers, guys kind of be like three years ago I think. It was very functional but it was
difficult to do any specific configurations with it they hadn't flushed out the tools. So your
primary method of configuring this was to issue the commands to the window manager which were
very complex and not something for an average user with uncomfortable billing. They have long,
you know, that's all in the past now they have this very extensive systems menu that you can
go in and tweak and a whole bunch of things everything from, you know, the font settings and the theme
to how the mouse works and the different rendering engines that you would want eight for a second.
So it's very customizable, very flexible. E-17 does not have a traditional panel with the use
instead of that a panel is called shelves and you can have any number of shelves on the desktop
that you would like and I'm not mistaken you might even be able to configure shelves per desktop
but what a shelf is is essentially it is think of it like the in KDE for what's the area where
you've put these sort of widgets what's that called the panel now. Okay think of it like a panel
but a shelf a shelf is just a kind of like the slit and flux box or whatever it's just a virtual
area that you could kind of store different things like gadgets. You can put a taskbar
object in a shelf you can put a gadget in a shelf you can put a whole bunch of different you know
dock apps in there if you wanted to whatever you want to put into a shelf you can put a shelf
into a shelf so you have a lot of flexibility in there and place things wherever you want to
on the screen it does have a traditional menu like you would find in a lot a root menu like
you'd find in a lot of window managed just like flux box and window maker and everything it has
one of those menus it also has a menu that you could pull off of the taskbar in the shelf or
you could put a menu gadget in the shelf that's very customizable through the system's menu it's
it can be very flashy it has transitions it has drop shadows a little bit of three-dimensional
effects to it and you can specify the rendering engine I think they'll do X render open GL
and software 16 was one that they call I don't know the exact meeting of all those but
so if you are on a lower end machine you can enable some of the transitional effects by using
a lighter rendering engine as opposed to you know a higher end machine you can go with a more
powerful rendering engine that can take up more resources I I enjoy E-17 unfortunately like I
said it seems that an evidently no matter window manager I use be it GNOME KDE or something like
flux box E-17 I always set them up very similar I'm not one that's big on
application or icons on the desktop I very rarely use a menu a root menu I prefer to launch
applications by getting a run dialog up and typing the name of the application so I always
set all space bar to run the run dialog the run dialog for E-17 is nice it's very customizable
in how it looks how it functions with regards to history how it scrolls through history it'll do
tab completion so it's it's nothing overly flashy it's not as big and bulky as the GNOME one
and it's but it's not you know you can limit it to the size of what you get with FB run on flux
box so that was that was nice probably the biggest downside E-17 is because of its very very
customizable and its flexibility it can be a little confusing when you're going through the
system menu to figure out exactly what does what now I kind of use a combination of of keyboard
control and and mouse control so I like to be able to navigate my virtual desktops but using
control all right left arrow keys to navigate between to move right and left on the virtual desktops
I also like to use the scroll wheel on the mouse to navigate the different virtual desktops
that's one thing I do not like about GNOME it doesn't allow you to do that unless you're over
to pager but every other window manager does by default E-17 doesn't allow you to do that
unless you're hitting control alt and scrolling the mouse key so I switched it over to just using
the the scroll the mouse scroll and what I found is no matter what application I was in like
fuz and Firefox and I wanted to scroll down it would when I tried to scroll down it would
scroll the desktops and what I later found out because I knew there had to be a way to do it when
you when you configure a mouse binding you also have to configure the what it binds to like an
area you could specify like an application window or part of an app like the border around it
or what I had to do to get it to work that if I was over the empty spot on the desktop and scroll
then it would go through the different desktops as opposed to if I was in a menu a window it would
put the scroll action into the window for the application as I had to set it to manager which
wasn't really clear as to what option was and there was I believe 12 different options that
you could choose from in that option in the in the window for configuring the bindings so you
don't always necessarily know what they are you have to really read the documentation but a
little trial and error and it was easy you know I got exactly what I wanted I do like E-17 I don't
know if I'm going to stick with it again because it is a little heavy for a little flat too
flashy for what I use it for and I really enjoy you know flux box I might enjoy awesome even more
so but it is it is a great window manager it's going to say something else about it now I can't
any any questions that you guys want to ask yeah same song then I'm investing in the development
of it we talked about on our cranks three or four weeks ago yeah it is it is nice it is something
to check out it is elegant like if we're trying to be very artistic um the gos operating system
used E-17 which came out a few years ago with their their g computer or gpc which uh that was nice
then you said when you open applications you open up the run door lock box you right you
I'd imagine you could do this in any of the windows managers configure hot keys for the majority
of applications that you use I do you have that set up in flux box at all or you don't bother I do
on on my on the mezzo I do what what what what I did on the mezzo was because of the flash issues
and a lot of the browsers I have a little script that actually executes the browser that I want
and and uh mitigate those flash issues with not being able to send mouse clicks through the flash
on certain uh web pages um I do have those hot keys the like if I wanted to fire a fire fox and
be control all after middore would be control all them um I have done that in the past but you know
I just get more custom just hitting the all run and typing in the first couple letters and
hitting tab and get whatever I want yeah I find that once I set up like it in awesome
particular case and and of course flux box prior to that once I get out of the trouble set up
a configuration file the first thing I do is copy it to all of the machines and ask because
I like to turn on a machine that looks exactly the same way as you know the one up in the computer room
with my laptop in the lantern whatever uh but what I did find is I I installed it on slackware
went and copied over the configuration file I need to find a bloody slackwares version 2.6
and doesn't use lure yet so that was a big fail on my part but you live alone there you go
like I can see that yeah I do that to Peter 64 I like to like to keep it consistent I you know
with flux box I like the like the ability to have applications open when you when you start
them up the open up in a specified screen but you are at a level awesome then because you can do
all that I'm so much more I'll be checking it out e17 is very themeable but I have not taken the
time to actually theme it myself other than the basic added about theme on arch which is the
elegant black and white theme and other times they've always seen e17 as a green style theme
I give e17 a I will give it two thumbs up overall but for my usage purposes of some and a half
so that's a 330 and a peg wall right there and the enlightenment was wasn't that the default
window manager for GNOME back in 1.0 no that was softish I thought enlightenment was before that
then softish replaced enlightenment to then later on metacity came into the picture or was softish
uh metacity you said tardy age I'm sorry metacity I don't know why whenever I see it I see
metacity but the fantastic metacity is there any way where can we find that out if if enlightenment
was the default I thought I read that somewhere it was back in like well I maybe it wasn't like the
complete default but I know back in your early red hat um five and six you had a choice between
enlightenment or softish or it wasn't like meant and then they changed the softish just like you
had said but we don't know what known version right Wikipedia says before the introduction of
metacity in GNOME 2.2 used enlightenment and then softish as its window manager yeah I guess
doesn't say which version for each but it does sound sequential to me well that would have been
E-16 I think E-16 has been around for a long time yeah I don't even worry back E-16 was
rather interesting in and of itself it was a pretty unique yeah I like E-16 a lot yeah
E-17 is significantly different sorry are they sorry are just wondering are we expected to say
E-17 running on telephones soon I'll take it I believe it already is running on telephones
I get running on a telephone at at scale but I don't know if it's out on the I don't know if that's
out on the market or not a production model yeah yeah it says that you can get it to run on as
little as I make a RAM and a 200 megahertz core processor yeah it's very flexible yeah it can
be very lightweight oh god I can't wait until it's released and we start here and about it on
tilts since we know you like to have the breaking news and in telephony bloody whatever it is
yeah when Android switches to it then you'll hear all about it I'll tell you what that
nexus not I'll set it before I'm not a fine person but the nexus is a noisling telephone but
that that is my review of E-17 worth of look elegant now what did you say you installed it on
it arch arch yes I'm sorry what is it a pretty easy install on arch
I think I used the AUR repository is the E-17 SVN release I think it's what it is under
under arch and it's not terribly large right I mean in terms of what you have to actually
no download for the install it's a pretty small little thing right yeah no it's not very
well any of the windows manages are going to be tiny aren't they it's any that look the
desktop environment that are going to get big I mean I'm pretty sure awesome there's a bloody
so awesome why is it this I'm sure it's less than a megabyte I would imagine yeah it was it
needed a couple of dependencies uh if anyone's going to install awesome on slackware you want to
get awesome three don't go back to two uh you have to recon recon pole um Cairo I think it was
Jaylees he was not uh otherwise you can't get it to run I think it doesn't have XCB support
and slackware yeah but that's my next chance are you are you running 13 or current and I just
said I mean yeah but I intend to apply with that because like I said I like to run the same
windows manager on all of them pretending natural to put on the slackware as well
e17 and e16 are both in said what's the difference staying what's the big difference between
six times seven i big uh there's a huge difference between the two uh 16 has been around for a
long time uh like I said 17 has been under development I think for at least 10 years
but there's uh there's significant differences between them um I mean enlightenment
16 had its own unique look and feel but uh they are very different um and how they operate
libraries that they use and configurations I don't think e716 has the shelves that e17 does
but uh it's been a long time since I used the enlightenment 16 okay and for mine I used
uh window maker and all my goodness no I'm just kidding I I used uh softfish and I'll put a link
to my screenshot and softfish is another window manager using a list based scripting language
seems to be pretty popular tonight the list is very lightweight and themeable and just on
their website alone they have like 400 themes but uh I am started on devian very easy install
the only thing I had to do to get it running because I don't use a logon manager is just
edit my x and it rc to start it up and the very first time I launched it I ended up with just a
black screen nothing but like a pager about the size of a postage stamp so I started beautiful
what else do you want yes all you need well I started clicking around you know left
clicking the mouse right clicking I mean nothing I started hitting some random keys I couldn't
like figure out what to do there's like absolutely nothing so I had to fire at my triple E and do
some searching and figure out how you know what how do I launch a program and come to find out I
had to click the middle mouse button and it would it would pull up a little menu and there was already
some stuff already preconfigured just some basic you know x stuff like x term so once I seen the
x term I knew I could fire that up and you know get Firefox going stuff like that the next thing I
did was that you know I want to like a panel so I went with fb panel and put it up at the top
and fb panel I mean I know it's a separate project from softfish but I mean right here they completed
the window manager I didn't have to do nothing else once I put that panel there I mean it was
like completely usable I didn't have to do nothing else I mean all my programs over there in the
menu the only thing I had to do is add some icons to the panel just some stuff I like to launch
quickly and I and I put the panel up there at 95 percent of the screen so I would have like a
space to go up there and middle click the mouse so you pull up the the menu again and there's
like a configuration tool so you can you know change the theme key bindings I mean you can
configure it any way you really that you want to I mean resize different things I mean there's
really nothing to it I mean it was easy easy install I mean once I put that panel up at the top
there's no problems at all like all the configuration files are enlist but with that configuration
tool you don't even have to you don't even have to look at unless you want to do something special
that you can't do with the configuration tool are they still developing softfish oh yeah it's
very active the the latest versions from the sometime in December 2009 but I mean it's very
active if you look at the wiki I mean everything's been updated like just a few days ago they do
have an IRC channel on on free node it's probably only has like 15 people in there but I think
most of them are developers so if you ask the question I mean within a couple hours something's
going to answer it so overall you you liked it then yeah I do I mean if it wasn't for KDE I would
be running softfish but maybe you know once I get tired of all the prettiness of KDE and all the
special 3d effects yeah I might go back to softfish it was previously called so mill
I had to change the night vision yeah I remember reading that somewhere another project had
the same name yeah that's what it is for me was a trademark or another company or not so it's
pretty much I mean it's more or less a traditional desktop kind of feel huh well it's it's a window
manager and that's all it is I mean yeah I don't have a panel so I mean you're you're getting
nothing and you can put anything you want I mean if you wanted like the Gennome panel right or
XFCE you know whatever you want you can customize it I mean you can even run it you know with KDE
and Gennome if you want okay but I can't say anything bad about it because it it does exactly
what's supposed to do I mean if you want a fast lightweight window manager I mean that's what it
does okay it doesn't restrict you at all I mean if you if you know list I mean you can go crazy
on this thing and really customize it like I said with that configuration tool you can do a lot
but I give I give it two thumbs up but as you get as you can tell from my screenshots I mean
looks like a normal desktop environment doesn't it yeah so you can there's just that one what
softfish are so far monster believe you go and you can configure everything you need and
it's that once again you can configure stuff like you know where applications start and if they
start up on when you boot into it and all that sort of stuff is at that configurable I suppose it
is yeah it is and there's all kinds of extensions you can add to it you know from their website
yeah they have all kinds of extensions you can add like if you want to add tabbing I mean I can't
I mean there's just a ton over there but like you can have you can do tabs windows like in fluxbox
I don't know if it's like in the if it puts the tabs in the maybe it's considered grouping
or where they go into that you know the title bar of your window yeah but it did say tabbing
but I didn't look into it so maybe it's doing something totally different I don't know
yeah so I think what we've learned is that any any of these things that you choose the
option to virtually unlimited as to what you want to do with them unless you choose window maker
and and rocks file like the rocks box or whatever these things you like to have installed
I mean we've had a truck yeah oh no it's because when I was just talking about it so I didn't
for years yeah so I didn't I didn't check it out because I already knew what it was and I liked it
yeah it's it's a whole different concept on how to use a desktop but we have it it's
barely well in a tip episode not that long ago that was one of the top it you know and that
was the same one as jailings you talked about that Zypha I remember jumping on Zypha and installing
rocks you need after the show now get back to whatever you were talking about I wouldn't pay
much attention anyway so it's just one final part about it it's fast I mean as soon as I click
something it's there I did go back in the flux box and I could just I could tell a speed
difference it seemed like saw a fish was faster yeah that surprises like it always thought flux
box was pretty quick awesome and flux box I certainly haven't noticed a difference between the
two of them it's it's been up the way I've worked but physically Michele Mars I don't think it's
any quicker or not notice a little quicker anyway yeah flux and and rap poison were free
I certainly I didn't perceive any big difference between them both are faster than Katie not the Katie
is slow but no that's what I was going to say that too I wouldn't call Katie or even like
denying three when I had a play around with that I'd certainly wouldn't call that slow all the
you know like when you minimize something in flux box I don't have it does it like amonate anything
hers is just like just close and go right to the panel it might just no vanishes gone okay yeah
like no animation or nothing I'd imagine on all these you can run that what is it the ex-comp
manager that the to get three parents in all that these days yeah probably well with awesome you
have to get the SVN version of that for awesome three that was another thing
that won't work without that cutting edge yeah I that wouldn't just be the archbild I don't think
would it go if you enter that leverage sort of stuff I'm not I'm too old I just like black well
did we get everybody's review thanks sir well then I have some parting shots to make
and that's the you know but the popular window managers are popular for a reason and the ones
that decline into obscurity do so for reasons too and some of them that are relatively obscure
obscure because they just haven't made their hit yet but they are up and coming and I think
possibly awesome is one of those soft issues it's kind of floating someplace in the middle
window maker it's time is coming gone you really don't like that I really did not I did not
like I I have never tried any window manager that that felt any worse than that one yeah I
I mastered made as I've played with a few of them over the time and sometimes I look at them and
think well what exactly is the point of this there are ones that are very similar to do a better job
and you wonder why someone's waste of the time but it's obviously a project that someone picked
up and just wanted to run with them but yeah well as far as window managers goes it's not
how much you can do everybody's trying to reinvent the wheel and square wheels just don't work
okay isn't it based on next step yeah that was the canoe project of taking the open the stuff
that next open sourced open stuff and like re-implementing it so it's like a 15 year old project
at this point yeah and it's kind of yeah I think it was like chasing after you know next which was
eventually sort of consumed anyway you know yeah consumed I guess well it's consumed and became
OS 10 yeah after Stevie got his job back but I think that's you know I mean that's
morality tale of why we shouldn't be chasing after other people's technology
sometimes it works out but I guess window maker is a good example of when it goes wrong
yeah it could be a cautionary tale instead of it
some of them are like window makers yeah I'm gonna say it you can't say that that's a pretty broad
statement that I'd imagine a lot of people have their love it and would consider like awesome
and flux box and all them and bloody waste of time all the window makers fans can we only want
super fans all of you please write in well there can't be that many fans or the development would
be a little more intense on it what did they got it at the point where they liked it and didn't
screw it it because they did everything they wanted it to do was anybody checked uh they're
mailing list or SVN maybe it's pretty active how about the L.I.S.A channel that's a quick indicator
to me I reckon how many people are in in just by game what by the eight people here three of
us seems to use tiling windows managers um a sawfish and window maker with a maker what what's
it called that one window maker yeah and and the one three thirty used they seem to be a little
bit similar more desktop environments um yeah well sort of uh sawfish maybe it wasn't but you
set it up to almost be one wants to be I think there's just something out there to suit every
individual with Linux and that's the beauty of it you don't get out with Linux uh with bloody
windows you get even fewer choices with the magic yeah the amazing amazing thing is I mean I've
got like a couple of different Linux uh machines and for each each one I could have
and to some degree do like have a customized environment just for that for that machine and
the activities that I do on that machine and that's that is pretty cool because you don't get
that with with macOS or whatever else what's what's there was one on looked at that just a
van a van ty Windows manager something what is that you know that's just a doc that's just a doc
all right so it's sort of no two-fold plaster that on top of Gnome or KDE or XFCE or whatever
they're running you can get pretty much you can plaster it on top of anything
that's that made it it looked a move like a mask I mean the knowledge I have of a mac anyway
yeah well it's it's sort of somewhat is that what's running in that EOS cloud 2 probably that's
exactly what EOS is running at the bottom yeah if I put into it that's what it would be
you know there are a couple of different docs out there yeah there are a couple of different
docs out there I mean it could be Cairo doc W bar oh yeah run W bar and flux box for a little
wall when I first got into it yeah the class of you should try to use a WN and um wrap poison
I would be like full green
I think it was a floating apps yeah true that would just turn the whole thing on it
but yeah I guess I should mention because I think someone was asking me about this
in rap poison the mouth does work you just don't need it as much but like once you're in
Firefox obviously it's like it's not that the mouth doesn't actually function it's just that you
don't need it to manage your windows I think someone asked me for the other thing with these
window managers is that if you do want a tiny bit of I can eat for about 30 seconds oh that's
about how long it takes me to get sick of it it's quite easy to fire up like um if you have
Katie installed you can fire up that plasma desktop and all of a sudden awesome looks like
KDE 4 you get all the beauty of KDE with the awesome features and you can do that with any
open content like that's more or less what most of them work so they're very nice
so that's what I mean with KDE and GNOME I used open boxes the the window manager yeah I like
that a lot about about the window managers and stuff in Linux but they're so so modular I guess
what they would be although something's aren't like sometimes if you like if you fire up like
Nautilus you'll get sort of like the desktop yeah but you can but you can start that with
um Nautilus what dash no desktop and it won't take over your flux box station I forgot about that
yeah Charlie it's no desktop or something you're right I think it is yeah dash dash no desktop yeah
I mean once again it's just it's unlimited to the options you can do with this sort of stuff
yeah yeah and really we like I certainly do only scratch the surface of what what I can all do
well that was a fun little challenge Jack Latu a good fun actually you've made many
change more why is that for sure yeah I'd been me to try rap boys and for ages so I was really glad to
have you know a reason to finally finally go for it so yeah well I should probably wrap it up
but uh the show notes will be a tip radio dot info in our new improved chat room at irc dot free
node dot net hash linux cranks uh the bad apples has joined forces with us one you said that
could podcast I've really got to listen to that one day pretty good where has the bad apples don't
bad apples didn't do anything they put uh the bad apples and they and made the linux hash linux
cranks the official channel of the bad apples did anyone bother asking the host of the bad apples
no that was not so the community decision it was just done well here's the community I think
only one black is the whole community just did it uh that's funny I did it for you claude you can't
you can't find the host of bad apples any place but in the linux cranks it's a plan you know we
have like I don't know 50 people in there the plan is to get like a hundred people so that way
we're going to go over to the linux outlaws and have a rumble we're going to have a rumble uh a
shoot at at the okay crowds because that's what those bad boys do and you can send us some feedback
at feedback at the tip radio dot info you guys ready for uh terry f's pick of the week sure
all right is it months basically going to be a country in western song no you're going to have
to request it uh there's a place if you list them buddy get a country in western for a change
in some tech knell for claude too thank you thank you i got a spurn out of here i'll see you guys later
okay see you tonight all night all night hi everyone good bye hey thanks monster bee
that is terry once again from the juice penguin um tonight's song is from a guy by the name of Carmine
at peace a song called nobody knew um he's been around for a couple decades he's actually the drummer
in the band um he's been involved in bands by the name of vanilla fudge cactus back ten new
to paint fluid many others um spot everything this guy touches this great so i hope you like it
that's nobody knew where they were headed except for the few who made it all clear nobody knew
who was running at a white house it's painted off like now
they think they were mine now we know the stained glass housing the boat is again it's all come to pass
all you ever want is clinical water wash off the stains close to the light
here we are there's two nations and i bring you the game lord ten new year it's not the same
new year now nobody knew where they were going except for the few who made it all clear
nobody knew who was running at a white house it's painted off like now
no one's inside there's a hole in the blue sky right side here the spins fine time for me
here time for me
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
It's all made new
Guess it's out of here
It's all for money
Peace within the world
Join you all
That's all in the blue sky
It's all in the blue sky
It's all in the blue sky
Thank you for listening to Hackers Public Radio
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net
She'll head on over to C-A-R-O.N-E-T for all of her students
Thanks for watching
Thanks for watching
