Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

[SteveRiley]

The talk about Razor-Qt today reminded me of something I've been wanting to ask you all for a while. Has anyone here experimented with running Linux using only a window manager like OpenBox or FluxBox or similar?

This notion seems popular with the Arch/Gentoo crowd. I've been reading through their forms and wikis to learn what folks like about it. I've even seen some people wax rhapsodic about purging almost all the plumbing: they refuse to install Gtk, Qt, D-Bus, even X Windows! I never gave much -- well, any -- thought to whether such a thing was possible. But apparently a few graphical apps exist that are happy with just a window manager and the Linux framebuffer. This almost sounds goofy enough to spend a weekend playing around with...

[Telengard]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

No, but I think a lot of Slackers and BSD-ers do.

Interestingly, there is an option in the Lubuntu login screen for "Openbox". I'll have to try that and see what it's like.

[de_koraco]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

This is me, Debian Stable with scrotwm, an OpenBSD tiling window manager.



I run Firefox on workspace one, and most of my daily stuff in rxvt-unicode terminals on workspace two (music, video, text editing, torrenting, mail, IM, file management...) and up. I do have GTK engines, because otherwise stuff just looks ridiculous. People who don't use a toolkit are doing it just for show. I used to run without a dbus session, but you don't get any performance increase without it or anything, stuff just doesn't automount, plus your wlan connection wouldn't autoconnectwith Network Mangler. I don't have a display manager, I use xinit and I sometimes fire up Thunar for moving stuff around.

It's not that easy to see any advantage to such a setup on your first experiment, because it takes time to find and configure CLi applications and the WM itself. Once you do set everything up, things fall into place. On a single core AMD V processor with 2 B of RAM and a 5400 HDD, I boot from grub to tty in 15 seconds, and my Xsession starts in about two. I never have any performance hit on any application, and they all launch immediately. My average uptime is about 20 to 30 days, because there's just nothing to break. Stuff like that.

If I were in your shoes, I'd start with a preconfigured Openbox or Fluxbox live distro, ala Crunchbang, Madbox, AntiX, Viperr. Openbox in particular strikes a great balance between an easy to use and easy to configure WM and a fuller desktop environment.

[SteveRiley]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

I do have GTK engines, because otherwise stuff just looks ridiculous. People who don't use a toolkit are doing it just for show.

That was my general impression, too.

It's not that easy to see any advantage to such a setup on your first experiment, because it takes time to find and configure CLi applications and the WM itself.

The principal reason for my interest in this is purely educational, so learning the configuration steps is one of the goals.

Openbox in particular strikes a great balance between an easy to use and easy to configure WM and a fuller desktop environment

Based on my research so far, I think I'm leaning more toward Fluxbox. Tabbed windows have a certain appeal, as do plain-text configuration files. I don't want to have to deal with XML for Openbox (although I know that obconf abstracts away most of that).

my Xsession starts in about two

What do you think about the notion of running without X? I had no idea people even used framebuffers anymore, but apparently some still do.

[de_koraco]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

I've hardly ever touched OBs XML files. Obconf and Obmenu do it all. Fluxbox is nice too. Running without X is a pipe dream. Most of your time spent on the computer is in the browser, which is why I actually like tilers and minimalist WMs, you fire up Fx on one workspace and doodle a little here and there with other applications.

mc, mpd+ncmpcpp, mcabber, dmenu, mutt, vim/Gnu Desktop Environment, tmux, screen, rtorrent, these are things to take a peak at. Evilwm and cwm are good minimalist floating WMs, dwm, scrotwm, Xmonad are great tilers, JWM, PekWM give a nice semi DE feel once they0re configured and so on.

+ You'll learn first hand a lot about how X handles your desktop if you don't use a display manager.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

IF you don't want to run X in order to use a gui browser you can always run lynx.

[SteveRiley]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

IF you don't want to run X in order to use a gui browser you can always run lynx.

Uh huh. Hold on, let me go get some stone knives and bearskins first.

Someone on one of those other forums said Opera would work fine without X. Huh. When I ran an apt-rdepends against it, plenty of X libs showed up as dependencies...

[GreyGeek]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

Hey, Lynx is lightening fast because it doesn't have to haul all the gui stuff around.

[Telengard]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

Hey, Lynx is lightening fast because it doesn't have to haul all the gui stuff around.

I'm pretty sure the lack of Javascript and Flash have a great deal more to do with Lynx's speed than its text interface.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

I tried Openbox with a distro, I think from the Fragman or somebody several years ago but it was way beyond my meager capabilites. I think the Fragman settled on Afterstep or something.

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

Hey, Lynx is lightening fast because it doesn't have to haul all the gui stuff around.

I'm pretty sure the lack of Javascript and Flash have a great deal more to do with Lynx's speed than its text interface.

No doubt, which made it a great browser in the past for text based HTML pages that didn't use Javascript. When I first got into Linux with RH 5.0 I used Lynx a lot. It's still the fastest browser around, even if it isn't very useful any more.

[de_koraco]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

elinks is almost fully useful. w3m is nice in its way as well. gpm (mouse on console) is useful if you plan to run without X or spend time on the ttys. Avoid stuff like Phonon, the Gstreamer framework or anything tied down to (a) desktop environment(s). I usually run rtorrent on tty2, and have keybindings in my scrotwm config for controlling mpd, so I can literally kill my GUI if I need, and still continue to listen to music and keep my torrents downloading while I fiddle with something. Once you no longer need to worry about X crapping out on you (and let's face it, it does that often), you eliminate the biggest stability issue in GNU/Linux.

[cavedweller]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

The talk about Razor-Qt today reminded me of something I've been wanting to ask you all for a while. Has anyone here experimented with running Linux using only a window manager like OpenBox or FluxBox or similar?

This notion seems popular with the Arch/Gentoo crowd. I've been reading through their forms and wikis to learn what folks like about it. I've even seen some people wax rhapsodic about purging almost all the plumbing: they refuse to install Gtk, Qt, D-Bus, even X Windows! I never gave much -- well, any -- thought to whether such a thing was possible. But apparently a few graphical apps exist that are happy with just a window manager and the Linux framebuffer. This almost sounds goofy enough to spend a weekend playing around with...

I remember back in the day lol, that just getting linux installed and running would leave you in about that situation. For along time even when I didn't have to, my systems were set up to boot to a command prompt. I preferred it that way when I was working on my Cisco cert because I didn't need a gui to play around in switches or routers. It was clean and just kind of made since.

The closest I have come to that in along time is installing a base debian system with xfce, without grub or lilo, and no dm, and using init. I still end up with X on the system but only in use if I want to use it. Then aptitude to remove some stuff I didn't want, reboot and hope it works, or start over. Something to occupy my time on a cold rainy day when I can't ride my Harley.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

Upon a reread of the thread, I ran #! for a year or so and learned a lot of stuff.

However, they went to....Debian with the Statler release and it rather lost some of it's "flavour" for me mainly because the menu system changed, it now builds automagically. but it is, indeed based on Openbox.

The community is very friendly and fiddling with Conky is truely a blast!

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

Re: Linux with a window manager, without a DE or toolkit or D-bus or X

...
I do have GTK engines, because otherwise stuff just looks ridiculous. People who don't use a toolkit are doing it just for show.

When I first ran Linux in May of 1998 using RedHat 5.0, the screen you displayed was just about all there was for a DE, and it came in about 20 different flavors. I tricked on up to look as much like Win95 as I could (I used a DE like that but I can't remember its name... somethingtwn). Nothing automounted and it you didn't do it by hand it didn't get done. However, it was blazing fast and stable as a rock. But, for me, Linux didn't become practicle until September of 1998, when SuSE released version 5.3, which included the KDE 1.0 beta desktop. After that, because of KDE, I spent most of my time running Linux. I haven't used a light weight client.

I used to run without a dbus session, but you don't get any performance increase without it or anything, stuff just doesn't automount, plus your wlan connection wouldn't autoconnectwith Network Mangler. ....

Before KDE, I always kept a console open to use mount, umount, locate, cal, ps, etc.... My favorite file manager was mc (written by de Icaza before he went to the dark side), which was always open as root in another console.

One often had to compile their own network card driver. I had to compile "tulip" or "Bonanza". A guy from NASA wrote the software drivers for most of the common NIC and distributed it under the GPL. He was single-handedly responsible before the year 2000 for getting most Linux boxes on line.