Desktop environments Archive

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.

Enlightenment 0.16.8.9 has been released. It contains several bugfixes and other improvements. "Version 0.16 of the Enlightenment window manager was released in 2000, along with its dependencies Imlib and Fnlib, and remains in heavy usage today. While rumors of its death still circulate, DR16.8.9 was released on August 11th, 2007, and it remains in development today with a long life still ahead of it. DR16 has been the choice of power users and artists due to its low overhead, highly graphical, widely theme-able, extremely configurable, yet unobtrusive interface. Nearly all functions of the window manager can be handled without mouse input, including application launching via e16keyedit. It also remains highly portable, with ports avalible for Linux on all platforms, FreeBSD, IRIX, Solaris X86 and Sparc, HP-UX, AIX, OS/2, and more."

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."

A new release of dwm is out, dwm-4.3. "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."

"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 third release candidate for Ion3 has been released. "This third 'rc' release again simply fixes some minor problems in the previous release." Get it from the download page. Ion is a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind.

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."

The second release candidate for Ion3 has been released. "This is the second 'rc' release, and contains primarily bug fixes and other minor improvements." Get it from the download page.

"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.

A new release of dwn is available. "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.

"A while ago Thomas Leonard wrote about Ubuntu integration and asked the question 'Can we get rid of ROX-Session?'. This inspired me to attempt to replace it with the Xfce session manager and it turns out that it is both easy to do and works very well."

The first release candidate of Ion3 has been released. "This is the first 'rc' or '(stable) release candidate' release of Ion3. This means that there will not be any further major changes to it. Bugs will be fixed, and as an exception to the general feature freeze, some hooks may still be added, if deemed useful. Translations may also be included. After no new bugs (that can not be deemed features) have been found in this or following 'rc' releases, the stable Ion3 will be released."

E16 version 0.16.8.7 and epplets version 0.10 are now available for download. "Add option to show windows on all desks in focus list. The CM now renders to the composite overlay window. Fix various updates when external background changes." Many more fixes are in the changelog.