Desktop environments Archive

E16 version 0.16.8.10 is now available for download. Changes: "Fix infinite loop when regenerating menus; fix potential incorrect termination of IPC connection which could cause segv.; eesh: fix bad event loop causing hangs in certain situations; fix xinerama head selection in certain situations; fix menu placement on xinerama screens; various minor bug fixes and enhancements."

A new snapshot of wmii has been released. "wmii is a dynamic window manager for X11. It supports classic and dynamic window management with extended keyboard, mouse, and filesystem based remote control. It replaces the workspace paradigm with a new tagging approach. Its minimalist philosophy attempts not to exceed 10.000 lines of code (including all shipped utilities and libraries), to enforce simplicity and clarity."

A new release of dwm is available, dwm 4.5 "dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled and floating layouts. Either layout can be applied dynamically, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed."

The last release candidate for Ion3 has been released. "This release features a few minor fixes. If no major problems are discovered, this is likely to be the last 'rc' release before the first and hopefully final 'stable' release." Ion is a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind.

Openbox 3.4.4 has been released. "Openbox is a minimalistic, highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support. Openbox lets you bring the latest applications outside of a full desktop environment. Most modern applications have been written with GNOME and KDE in mind. With support for the latest freedesktop.org standards, as well as careful adherence to previous standards, Openbox provides an environment where applications work the way they were designed to."

Openbox 3.4.3 has been released. "Openbox is a minimalistic, highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support. Openbox lets you bring the latest applications outside of a full desktop environment. Most modern applications have been written with GNOME and KDE in mind. With support for the latest freedesktop.org standards, as well as careful adherence to previous standards, Openbox provides an environment where applications work the way they were designed to."

"If you want an adaptable window manager that doesn't drain your resources, try Openbox. Its latest version, 3.4.2, released this month, has several visual improvements and dozens of new usable features. Since it's easy to customize, many people replace their stock window managers with Openbox. It can run inside both GNOME and KDE (but not Xfce), replacing their native window managers. It can also be used as a lightweight desktop environment on its own."

"Spending too much time organising your windows instead of getting things done? Tiling window managers aim to handle the layout for you. In this article, I'll show how to configure Ion 3 to work with ROX. The basic idea of a tiling window manager is to use all of the screen space for windows, without gaps or overlapping. So, if you have two windows side-by-side and you make one of them a bit bigger, the other one shrinks to make room. I often have several source files open, plus a couple of terminals and maybe a log viewer, so I started looking for something to make things a bit slicker."

"The OpenMotif Project Team announced today the release of OpenMotif 2.3, marking the most significant version of OpenMotif since it was released to the open source community in May 2000. OpenMotif 2.3 includes major feature enhancements and over 25 bug fixes requested by developers of enterprise applications. OpenMotif is the publicly licensed version of Motif, the industry standard user interface toolkit for UNIX systems provided on more than 200 hardware and software platforms including HP, IBM, Sun, SGI, and Linux (Red Hat and Novell SUSE)."

ROX-Filer 2.6.1 has been released. ROX-Filer is the filemanager at the core of the ROX desktop. "Some problems with session management were fixed. This makes it easier to use ROX-Filer with gnome-session and similar. When creating thumbnails, we can now use a thumbnail embedded in an Exif image, which speed things up. A couple of build problems were fixed."

"After a very productive series of preview releases, Openbox 3.4 is here! If you haven't yet, we'd really like to recommend that you read through the 'Upgrading to 3.4 guide', which is on the Openbox web site, here. The number of changes since 3.3.1, as you'll know if you've been following the preview releases, can be a little overwhelming. The upgrading to 3.4 guide talks about most of them, along with pretty pictures to show many of the new features."

"If you use a traditional desktop like GNOME or KDE, a keyboard-controlled desktop with a minimum of utilities may seem like stepping back 10 or 15 years in the history of interface design. Why bother, when traditional desktops are easy to use and RAM and disk space are so cheap nowadays?" On a related note, there is a new release of xmonad, a tiling window manager for X, written in Haskell. It now has full Xinerama and XRandR support, so you can add, remove, or rotate monitors on the fly.

Dwm 4.1 has been released. "dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled and floating layouts. Either layout can be applied dynamically, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed. It is the little brother of wmii."

AfterStep 2.2.6 has been released. As was the case with the last release, the changelog simply reads: "Everything got touched. It's all good." If you have 2.1.0 or later installed, you can use the upgrade package. Alternatively, you can wait for your distribution to package it for you.