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

[de_koraco]

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

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.

These days, window managers offer the same speed and stability, but you also get modern amenities, be it via freedesktop protocols like dbus, or standalone programs - since we're talking about automounting, pmount is a script that allows for userspace mounting outside of fstab, devmon is a userspace deamon that automounts stuff via udisks. You do have to dig a little deeper than with KDE or Gnome and Unity, but that's half the fun. As I said, I tend to keep away from DE-centric technologies like Gstreamer, Network Manager or file indexing, because I can shave off a lot of overhead and actually increase stability. Say, I don't need the 100 MB download for codecs, because my media players of choice, mpd and mplayer, have all the codecs built in, I don't have any problems with wifi network connections dropping because ifupdown wither works 100% correctly or doesn't work at all, my sound always works because I don't use Pulse. Most importantly, the primitive tech I use means I'll pretty much never have to change configurations, because it's all implemented in dumb config files, so I'll just keep /home unformated and keep rolling.

Btw, mc is still running strong. I fire up Thunar from time to time, but most of my file management is done with coreutils or mc.

[SteveRiley]

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

cal

Jerry, you are full of these little gems that I'd honestly never even think to go looking for. I'm reading what you wrote and I see "cal." Eh? Okie, let's try it:

steve@steve-aspire:~$ cal
January 2012
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31

Well, well. And of course man cal really ought not to surprise me by now, but I don't think I would ever have expected to receive a bit of a history lesson from a man page, let alone humor:

BUGS
   The assignment of Julian–Gregorian switching dates to country codes is historically naive for many countries.

And, I suppose because it's there, someone had to turn the thing 90 degrees:

steve@steve-aspire:~$ ncal
January 2012
Su 1 8 15 22 29
Mo 2 9 16 23 30
Tu 3 10 17 24 31
We 4 11 18 25
Th 5 12 19 26
Fr 6 13 20 27
Sa 7 14 21 28

*slaps forehead* <- in a good way

[whatthefunk]

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

I run Crunchbang on an old laptop of mine. Its only got Openbox. Its brilliant for this situation because having a GUI on that machine really slows it down (only 256 MB Ram). I use Opera, but not the latest 11.60 because that one crashes too much to be useful. 11.52 works fine though. I purged most of the fluff like Network Manager and do most things through the terminal. Works like a charm and I dont think that computer will ever see a proper DE again.

[woodsmoke]

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

Guys
I learn something every day at this place!

woodsmoke

[HalationEffect]

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

Well, well. And of course man cal really ought not to surprise me by now, but I don't think I would ever have expected to receive a bit of a history lesson from a man page, let alone humor:

BUGS
  The assignment of Julian–Gregorian switching dates to country codes is historically naive for many countries.

Related to that, try entering:

cal 9 1752

and look at the results

[GreyGeek]

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

$ cal -3 9 1752
  August 1752     September 1752     October 1752   
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 
          1     1 2 14 15 16  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 
 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 17 18 19 20 21 22 23  8 9 10 11 12 13 14 
 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 
16 17 18 19 20 21 22            22 23 24 25 26 27 28 
23 24 25 26 27 28 29            29 30 31       
30 31

Makes perfect sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

[GreyGeek]

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

....
And, I suppose because it's there, someone had to turn the thing 90 degrees:

steve@steve-aspire:~$ ncal
January 2012
Su 1 8 15 22 29
Mo 2 9 16 23 30
Tu 3 10 17 24 31
We 4 11 18 25
Th 5 12 19 26
Fr 6 13 20 27
Sa 7 14 21 28

*slaps forehead* <- in a good way

Little gems is right! In all the years I've used cal, I never knew about ncal!

[bsniadajewski]

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

Wow, I learn something new every day. I've never heard of cal or ncal until now. I've been using KDE's little calendar so I haven't needed to use it, much less mnow of it.

[SteveRiley]

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

Imagine the neat little easter egg they could have embedded in this:

cal -y -13700000000

But instead all we get is:

cal: invalid option -- '1'

[de_koraco]

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

I had some time on my hands, so I set up an Openbox environment for fun. I did have to edit rc.xml (which is what obconf mostly changes, it's like a control panel I guess) to add my mpd keybinds, but the rest was done without even touching config files, all with obconf and obmenu. My favorite thing about OB is probably the middle click menu, which brings up a list of all the windows open on all the workspaces, so you don't need a panel at all. The scrot doesn't show it, because the root menu is better looking

[SteveRiley]

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

Neat. I did a command-line Ubuntu install the other day and then added FluxBox. Then I installed Chromium but it didn't show up in the menu; apparently, FluxBox doesn't automatically rebuild its menus even when XDG-compatible apps are installed. Need to research this more.

Then I installed OpenBox, which immediately detected Chromium, and in general seems to play better with XDG -- this observation is admittedly based on only 30 minutes of experimentation.

I wish these two *boxes would just team up! That would be cool.