[TAG] icewm light weight desktop

[Thomas Adam]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 09:57:45AM +0530, J.Bakshi wrote:
> I'll definitely go through those article. what window manager do you
> use ?

You clearly don't pay enough attention to reading the LG, if at all.  :) 
[1,2].  I suppose you ought to read the recent TAG entries as well [3,4,5].

> > You're also suffering from a fundamental lack of understanding about
> > what a desktop environment is, and what a window manager is.
>
> I don't have much knowledge in this matter but I at-least know that a
> window-manager and a desktop-environment are two separate component.

Right.

> now a million-dollar question. is it practically possible to run
> K-desktop environment on xfce or icewm window manager ? if possible
> then how ? I am too much interested to do such an experiment.

Only where those window managers are EWMH compliant [3], for which icewm
seems to be.  This allows things like the kde kicker and gnome's taskbar
to be handled correctly from the window manager that will run 'inside'
of the KDE or GNOME environment.  Effectively this process is using
Session Management [2], although in reading that, you would need to
replace the current running window manager in GNOME with icewm.  You
can't use "icewm --replace" as that's specific to FVWM, hence you should
use:

``
killall metacity && sleep 1 && icewm &
''

Then you'd have to save your session before you logged out (via
gnome-session-properties).  I have to say that I absolutely _hate_
session managers.  I can't stand them.  They're terrible at what they do
and what they do, is second rate.

If you want to use KDE instead, the process can get a bit trickier -
I have heard rumours of the use of candles and goats, but....

KDE is started via the 'startkde' script.  If you edit that script what
you might see is a line such as:

``
ksmserver
''

which starts the window manager (kwin by default). To start fvwm you
should add the option "-w icewm" to the ksmserver line, and save the
file.  On typing  'startkde' this should then launch icewm as the window
manager of choice.

Of course, all of this is theory - I don't use icewm so I am just
applying what I already know.

-- Thomas Adam

 [1] http://linuxgazette.net/105/adam.html
 [2] http://linuxgazette.net/100/adam.html
 [3] http://linuxgazette.net/104/tag/4.html
 [4] http://linuxgazette.net/105/tag/1.html
 [5] http://linuxgazette.net/105/tag/2.html
--  
"One of us is a cigar stand, and one of us is a lovely blue incandescent
guillotine" -- Stephen Malkmus, "Type Slowly" from "Brighten The Corners"