DistroWatch has a quick write up on the current status of FVWM, an old favorite.
FVWM – Still Alive and Well
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!
Thanks to Distrowatch, OSNEWS and the author! This is what I have been looking for! A lazy version of the FVWM docs
Wow, two articles on FVWM in a month (even if one is a response to the other). FvwmThemes is nice, but I still craft my own. Most of the themes are for 2.5.x, the development relese. The majority active fvwm users seem to be on it but I stick with 2.4 since it comes with Slack.
FVWM realeases are glacial in speed though. With an update every 4-6 months and a development cycle measured in years.
There is one mistake though, he says you can have 9 desktops. Actually you can have 4,294,967,296 desktops (numbered from -2147483648 to 2147483647). Why anyone would nee more than one or two dozen is beyond me but the limit is much higher than 9.
The article mentions that people don’t use FVWM because they take one look and run. Well, that was partly true in my case.
But I’d like to point out that I’m not completely superficial like that. For example, when you startup OpenBox there’s aboslutely nothing to look at but a plain black screen. It hardly wows you. But after poking around with it for a couple hours, setting up my menu, learning the keyboard commands, etc.. I was really impressed and it has been my WM of choice ever since.
But when I have taken a look at FVWM over the years, it just seemed hopelessly antiquated and ugly to me. Like twm.
So – I’m issuing a … challenge? Show me what FVWM *can* look like.
Check out the FVWM-Crystal theme (tho it’s more of a meta-theme, as the theme itself is quite configurable).
Info page: http://www.linuxpl.org/software/fvwm-crystal/info.en.html
Screenshots page: http://www.linuxpl.org/software/fvwm-crystal/gallery.en.html
It looks quite good. I’ve played around with it on my systen, and it seems nice, tho I’m not sure if I want to switch to it full-time.
IMO, FVWM is the closest thing Linux has to LiteStep, even if the default look is ugly.
Geez, people, those screenshots make FVWM look like it ought to be painted on black velvet and on sale at the mall, next to the Elvis stuff.
Are there any modern, easy-to-read and easy-to-use, and, well, grown-up, themes for this thing?
FVWM dev’s need to get with the time and provide a decent out of the box default config or they will continue to lose interest. FVWM is a fantastic product with great potential and its just the kind of thing geeky theme modders like to get hooked on if only there was an attractive inital theme to hook them.
Granted, this probably takes a week to do, but here is an example of what can be done.
http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?screen_id=2018826797408c1be180672&p…
Wow, you’d never think it was capable of graphics that beautiful. Seems with the last bunch of distributions I’ve tried twm is the default now.
there is a huge thread about fvwm at gennto.org
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=80517
http://www.fvwm.org/screenshots/desktops/Nuno_Alexandre-1600×1200/s…
http://www.fvwm.org/screenshots/desktops/Tavis_Ormandy-desk-1152×86…
Have a look at the AnotherLevelUp .fvwm2rc editor:
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~jtl/ALU/
My first Linux experience was with Red Hat 5.1 around roughly 1997, and the default WM was FVWM2 setup to resemble Win 95. Kernel was 2.0 series. Amazingly swift and responsive for my Pentium class machine with a whopping 48 megs of RAM. Really though since Gnome and KDE hit the scene, and since I discovered Fluxbox and WindowMaker I never really thought about it much. Glad to see it being kicked around. 🙂 Development cycle measured in years? Damn. How many core developers do they have, one? 🙂 Cool stuff. Maybe I’ll give it another go. Say, anyone else remember that Linux config utility that came bundled with Red Hat back then that was simply called LinuxConfig or some such? I believe it had both a GUI an text counterpart. I remember it being a bit confusing, whatever happened to it?
…Because my first experience with GNU/Linux and X-Window was about FVWM.
Because FVWM is ugly: yes it is a feature. When you use it you know how it is,
You don’ t take care of appearance or if User Interface is
really coherent, GTK QT…it is just un application I want to rum
Because it is a small piece of software, stable, uits development don’ t stop;
it make me feel nearer to Lunux|Unix core.
I like KDE and Gnome and use them,
but sometimes, on my old P133, FVWM is the best, with Applixware then…
(Argh my Applix-CD is broken
)
These opinions are to be taken as my personal thought
and don’ t pretend to be the ultimate Truth