Jim Farnsworth takes a look at the ICEwm under MEPIS. On other X11 news, with Release, X.Org seals the fate of XFree86 says InternetNews.
A Look on ICEwm; XOrg Vs XFree86
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The new CVS access at the X.org Foundation will allow us to submit a patch that we feel has been long overdue in X. Until now the input from touchscreens has been mapped right on top of mousebutton 1. This had the undesireable effect of dumbing-down the application, telling the application as it did that there was no need to differentiate the input of a touch from a mouseclick. Well, that is NOT what the very necessary modern notion of rich user input is all about.
There are very good reasons for an application to be able to tell the difference, of course, and by simply giving touchscreens their own input mapping, to mousebutton 10, for instance, applications can now sense the difference and the concept of ‘rich user input’, comes a little closer to living up to the promise.
Of course, X is all about remote displays, so now a host running one of our ViewTouch client applications in Oregon can serve up a display to users anywhere on the Internet and it can appreciate whether they are touching the display to navigate an application’s GUI or whether they are, simultaneously, clicking on the GUI components as part of an editing process.
Now that X is fully free we expect a LOT of benefits from the vast amount of improvements and fixes that a lot of people are working on and can freely contribute. Five minutes well spent. Freedom makes a BIG difference. No doubt about it.
IceWM is really great on machine with slower CPU’s and less RAM. While it doesn’t integrate apps as well as KDE or GNOME do, the *extremely low* memory and CPU requirements make up for that bigtime.
On my 366MHz machine with 160MB RAM, I am able to run a lot of simultanious programs without having my machine swap like madness. Just the KDE desktop uses half of my RAM, without running any apps!
But, on my other machine with 768MB RAM, I do prefer KDE. IceWM is not better in functionality than KDE. It Just Ain’t.
I’ve found IceWM to be a lot more keyboard-friendly and configurable than KDE. Thus I prefer the former to the latter, no matter how much RAM my machine has.
Good news everyone!
Sorry, couldn’t resist
Anyhow, it’s been a very long time since I last used ICEwm, actually it looks like a good alternative to xfwm. Though, I’d miss the agualemon-theme. Anyone know if it has been ported?
What’s the difference between X.org and Freedesktop’s Xserver?
I’m another supporter of IceWM. A lot of people complain about performance of X and such, but changing the window manager easily creates a noticable increase in performance. I install it on top of Slackware.
The writer chose an absolutely terrible desktop background for those screenshots. Ice has some elegant and simple interfaces. Even a solid background can look (and perform) better.
LOL, those were some hella ugly screen shots…I’ve seen IceWM look pretty darn good for a minimalist wm. However, my fave remains XFCE…
foo
X11R6.7 (aka Xorg) is a fork of XFree 4.4rc2. While the X-Server on freedesktop.org (aka kdrive) is an tniy Xserver (for trying experimental extentions) written from ground up.
I always come back to IceWM, too.
I use IceWM since a couple of years. After the occasional test of another window manager I am usually back to IceWM and WindowMaker after few days. My hardware isn’t the newest, so a small footprint is welcome.
should be “in other news”
ICEwm just rocks on new or old systems. I have tried them all, I, like the author, always come back! I use it on my 566 celeron 256 meg and my dual Athlon 2400 1 gig box. It is just flat out easily configurable.
Now, on X speed. Most of the X speed issues are from the clients, not from X itself. Try this example. Bring up a webpage in Mozilla, Opera and Dillo. Using ICE with Opaque moves/resizes enabled move the exact same window around on top of the 3 browsers. Dillo redraws it’s client area faster than you can move the window, even on my 566 celery. On the other hand, I can still see redrawing on the dual rig with opera or mozilla.
It’s not X folks, it’s the X client!!!!
No, I am not saying to use Dillo as your web browser as it is quite limited. The point being if Dillo can refresh/redraw it’s area so fast that you cannot spot redraws then you have to blame the “preceived” X speed on the client.
Bill
Most of the X speed ‘issues’ I hear about are to do with GTK+ 2.x properly handling redraw events.
A client should only redraw once it has consumed ALL outstanding redraw events, so as not to unnecassarily redraw the screen.
While a user is resizing the window, redraw events are constantly being generated, and GTK+ 2.x will not redraw until there is a lull in redraw events.
Unfortunately, I can’t find a reference to this style of redraw handling, but believe me, it is the recommended way (especially over a network.)
ICEwm is fairly nice, but XFce is simply more polished and looks more professional.
Anyone know if Mepis is becoming a full-breed pay-distro? So far there have been free downloads available but currently the project page http://www.mepis.org/ appears to encourage users to buy Mepis.
IceWM is nice if you like to navigate using keyboard but XFCE is better for mouse navigation.
BTW, XFCE and “X Window System Version 11 Release 6.7 (X11R6.7)” are prime examples of the lack of imagination that technical people often have in naming their products. Mepis may be a bit better, provided you can associate it with Memphis. “IceWM – cool window manager” is much, much better.
Mepis is running new betas right now. They’ll be splitting the product into two lines: ProMepis for power users and SimplyMepis for everyone else. The beta I’m using isn’t very impressive right now but that’s because the kernel options aren’t quite the best at this moment in time and hotplug is gone wacko. I fully expect this to improve in the coming weeks
And as for the naming, the techies aren’t attempting to market the brand names, they’re just trying to put a product out. So-called “Power users” like myself could careless what they call it, as long as it rawks.
foo
“the techies aren’t attempting to market the brand names, they’re just trying to put a product out.”
Being uncommercial is a poor excuse for being unimaginative.
“ProMepis for power users and SimplyMepis for everyone else.”
Nah. Distros like Mepis are targeted for newbies like me. Real power users don’t need pretty GUIs to configure their Debian system. 😛
“Being uncommercial is a poor excuse for being unimaginative.”
Sure. Except that most devs/techies don’t care…and frankly, neither do users who know what they’re doing
“Nah. Distros like Mepis are targeted for newbies like me. Real power users don’t need pretty GUIs to configure their Debian system. 😛 ”
Right on, hence… “So-called ‘Power users’ like myself could careless what they call it, as long as it rawks.”
Regarding DEs and WMs, in all honesty I like using all of them to a degree. XFCE is the one I return to most often. I think the MacOS theme on IceWM is friggin’ hilarious, I like to use it to throw people off
foo