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Kimm
April 14th, 2007, 02:05 AM
I'm thinking about moving to a more lightweight desktop, OpenBox is my primary candidate, but I would like to have a lightweight panel to go with it.

Thoughts anyone? I would also suggestions to completely different environments :)

FuturePilot
April 14th, 2007, 02:06 AM
XFCE? It's not as light as Openbox but it's no where near as heavy as Gnome or KDE. It's still pretty light.

Onyros
April 14th, 2007, 02:15 AM
I'm a sucker for Fluxbox... And once you get the hang of autogrouping and start grouping tabs of different apps on the same window... You'll be hooked and it'll redefine the way you use your desktop.

igknighted
April 14th, 2007, 02:17 AM
I like IceWM. It is easier than Fluxbox and has some great themes available. But Fluxbox is awesome too. The panel is not as useful in Fluxbox, but overall Fluxbox rocks. The advantage with fluxbox is you can just install fluxbuntu, which has it preconfigured to rock, so that might be worth a shot. Check out a bunch until you find one you like tho.

kerry_s
April 14th, 2007, 02:48 AM
I recommend fluxbox, but it's something you have to get use to, but everything is simple text files, so if you can edit, you can fluxbox.

Sunflower1970
April 14th, 2007, 04:18 AM
I like IceWM + Thunar. Absolutely love how customizable all the menu options are. For the moment I've switched back to E17 for something different for a while.

I also installed Fluxbox, haven't had time to really play around with it yet...

K.Mandla
April 14th, 2007, 04:27 AM
Openbox plus pypanel, perlpanel, fbpanel or lxpanel. Personally I think lxpanel is the best, because it doesn't require a lot of hand-editing to set up like you want. Runs well with pure Beryl too.

Linuturk
April 14th, 2007, 05:06 AM
Take a look at www.fluxbuntu.org

We have our first release coming up right after Feisty.

Somenoob
April 14th, 2007, 05:34 AM
Pypanel is quite an elegant panel and goes well with Openbox. There are a lot useful tutorials here on openbox:

http://ubuntuforums.org/search.php?searchid=17944248

aysiu
April 14th, 2007, 05:46 AM
Another vote for IceWM and Thunar.

tbroderick
April 14th, 2007, 05:52 AM
Thoughts anyone? I would also suggestions to completely different environments :)

greatest window manager ever--> dwm <--greatest window manager ever

hoheszeh
April 14th, 2007, 09:48 AM
my vote goes to ion3.

who needs icons and windowborders, or even a mouse anyway? ;)

Tux Aubrey
April 14th, 2007, 10:39 AM
And just to make sure you have the full range of ultra-lite WMs, I'll throw in E17.

There's a good How-to here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=20216)

I'd also second the vote for fluxbox.

forcesofhabit
April 14th, 2007, 11:18 AM
My vote goes to IceWM with the ROX-filer.. I've never tried it with Thunar. I can take a guess that I would like that even better though!

Onyros
April 14th, 2007, 12:44 PM
I forgot to add PCManFM, so my Dream Team on the Desktop Issue is:

Fluxbox (and then I use idesk+idesktools to setup a few icons on the desktop easily) + PCManFM

ahaslam
April 14th, 2007, 03:37 PM
Openbox plus pypanel
+1 ;)

happy-and-lost
April 14th, 2007, 04:38 PM
Openbox and Pypanel works nicely, but I think it's quite easy to use the XFCE panel with OB if you want something more powerful.

I don't think Gnome is *that* heavy, though. I've got my Debian box down to 45MB RAM used at startup into a full Gnome desktop :)

ynnhoj
April 14th, 2007, 04:49 PM
i'll second any suggestions for openbox. for file management: thunar (my preference) or rox-filer will compliment openbox quite nicely. all the panels i can think of have already been mentioned.. but another app i really like is visibility (http://projects.l3ib.org/visibility). it's a pager/iconbox sorta thing. right now i have visibility and an xclock running all the time in the bottom-right corner of my screen, and that's really all i need. alternatively, you could use conky to display the date and time (among all sorts of other things :)).

pekwm is also a pretty nifty window manager.

ion3 is probably my favourite of the tiled window managers, if you're thinking of going that route.

Nils Olav
April 14th, 2007, 05:29 PM
Jwm if you need an extremely lightweight window manager. Xfce or Fluxbox otherwise.

Kimm
April 15th, 2007, 03:10 PM
Thanks guys! Sorry I havn't replied sooner, we have had great weather here, so I've spent as much time as I could outside :)

You've given me some great alternatives! :D right now I realy lke Fluxbox, but I'll look into IceWM later tonight!

freduardo
April 20th, 2007, 06:36 PM
Openbox plus pypanel, perlpanel, fbpanel or lxpanel. Personally I think lxpanel is the best, because it doesn't require a lot of hand-editing to set up like you want. Runs well with pure Beryl too.

I'd have to agree with K. Mandla here. In comparison to fluxbox, openbox feels much more natural to me. But that's just an opinion of course.

I guess if you want real lightweight (and usability) you would have to choose between one of the *box'es or ICEWM.
Somewhere in the middle would be XFCE.

Try them (all) out and then pick the one you feel most comfortable with. In the mean time, setting up and configuring each of them will give you a chance to get to know them all better.