switching window managers

[aplannan]

New to TC and to linux in general. I have a small amount of experience with puppy linux, another distro which uses JWM as the default window manager. JWM in puppy seemed to have a problem with flashplayer going to fullscreen , and TC seems to be having the same problem. With puppy my solution was to switch to fluxbox, which i really liked using. Wondering how difficult it would be to use fluxbox with TC. 

[roberts]

I am currently working on it for 2.x. By way of a small collection of iterface programs.

Some questions have already come up why I was demoting JWM from controlling startup and restart programs as well as background and other areas. Many of these I have been moving to the control of .xsession and independent programs.

I have flwm, my favorite WM, currently integrated with TC. Fluxbox integration  is next on my TODO.

[aplannan]

Hi,

Thank you for the very quick response. I downloaded fluxbox and followed the directions here:

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.com/tiki-index.php?page=Creating+Extensions

I installed the fluxbox.tce and changed the xsession and .desktop files and actually got it to work. I still need to clean it up and manually make a new menu, but I'm up and running. This is a very neat distro!

[roberts]

Great. The interface files I am making will allow the extension menu to be updated upon loading of extensions, ie, parsing jwm xml to flux [](){}

[aplannan]

Don't know if this will interest you or not, but i remembered that someone had made a similar script for puppy:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?search_id=1996554511&t=24987

[hairywill]

I have a small amount of experience with puppy linux, another distro which uses JWM as the default window manager. JWM in puppy seemed to have a problem with flashplayer going to fullscreen , and TC seems to be having the same problem.

jwm had patches for fullscreen applied to the subversion repository 5 - 7 weeks ago. Try compiling the latest jwm nightly. Also, different websites have different minimum requirements for the flash version number to achieve fullscreen.

[curaga]

Hmmm, rounded corners, transparency, other fixes. Might be a nice release. I wonder if it fixes the initial-window-placement-under-tray and the icons-disappear-under-new-Xorg bugs.

hairywill, I believe some of these fixes are from you; thanks

[jpeters]

I have a small amount of experience with puppy linux, another distro which uses JWM as the default window manager

Now there's an understatement...how about one of the most respected members of the puppy community....(at least that's how I see it). Great to see you over at tc...

[tobiaus]

JWM in puppy seemed to have a problem with flashplayer going to fullscreen , and TC seems to be having the same problem. With puppy my solution was to switch to fluxbox, which i really liked using.

yeah, this annoys me too, it's actually the biggest problem i have with jwm. however, i've tried tiling managers, gnome, kde, openbox, flux, blackbox, flwm, xfce, and i tried to build slax with a tabbed manager yesterday. i've also tried just using a term as the "window manager" in x. none of these make me as happy as jwm. also i dislike flux (well, gnome and flux) the most of them. good news is that using an alternate wm in tc is almost as easy as it is in puppy (1.x,) from my experience. 2.x moreso.

[hairywill]

@jpeters
The quote you posted was from aplannan not me. I would have said I have a large amount of experience with puppy.

@curaga
I have poked at jwm a bit and did identify a cause of the fullscreen problem. All the recent work on rounded windows / transparency and bug fixes has been done by Patriot and Joe himself. See this thread. I have done a couple of weird things with jwm, speaking menus and flyout trays.

I am currently taking a break from doing any linux development but I have been reading here for a bit and think that tc is great. It is interesting to see the difference between puppy as a fully configured newbie friendly live cd and tc as a very powerful compact distro building base system. Barry Kauler is currently working on a new puppy build system called woof which uses an existing debian / ubuntu / slackware (and I think fedora) repository to build an iso. There really ought to be areas of cross fertilisation between puppy and tc. I hope that the dsl murgalua argument has not soured the relationship between the two communities. I think that dsl made more use of murgalua than puppy ever did.

[tobiaus]

I think that dsl made more use of murgalua than puppy ever did.

it did. murgalua was an excellent means of scripting... i really liked murgalua and miss it now that i use tc, but it's gone now and i don't think it will be back. i'm sure it took a lot of work to change everything over to fltk/lua and i think under the circumstances that was the best thing to do.

There really ought to be areas of cross fertilisation between puppy and tc. I hope that the dsl murgalua argument has not soured the relationship between the two communities.

i can't imagine in countless realities how that could be a good idea. with all the trouble in the past, wouldn't it be nice to keep it there, move on, and see other people? i know how these things go, we feel guilty and say "let's just be friends!" because it worked so well before. let's not, let's just leave each other alone, can't we? not telling anyone "stay out," i can't say no one will ever use a puppy idea here, and puppy should use tc ideas if they want, that's why free software is great. but i can hope anyone that comes here generally leaves puppy at the door, even if they don't. see below:

the opinions expressed in this post are those of tobiaus and not those of robert shingledecker, tinycore's other users, or its developers.

[SublimePorte]

It probably goes against the lightweight philosophy of TCL, but it'd be nice to see openbox, and LXDE on TCL. That would make it quite usable for me.

I had a go at compiling openbox myself, but ran into too many problems with the locations of libraries. It was a nightmare to get through the configure script, and even things which were clearly installed were not being detected (even after setting variables per wiki instructions).

[tobiaus]

It probably goes against the lightweight philosophy of TCL, but it'd be nice to see openbox, and LXDE on TCL. That would make it quite usable for me.

well, there is an openoffice extension. openbox and lxde are reasonably lightweight. lxde was created by pcman, the same guy that makes the ridiculously lightweight nautilus/xfe clone i'd like to see in tc. (xfe needs a heavy library, pcmanfm does not.) EDIT: yeah consider this a second "vote" (loose term, you can't ultimately make volunteers do anything by voting) for lxde, it includes pcmanfm so i can strip the extension to get the file manager for myself. (if the extension is created by someone.)

[SublimePorte]

I managed to cpmpile pcmanfm and get it running on tcl, but a file manager alone is not really sufficient, a full lxde desktop would be nice for tcl, and would still keep it fairly lightweight, relatively speaking.

[tobiaus]

I managed to cpmpile pcmanfm and get it running on tcl, but a file manager alone is not really sufficient, a full lxde desktop would be nice for tcl

like you've probably already gathered from this thread, different wm's are going to be easier to use in 2.x, so it's just a matter of someone compiling lxde and making it into an extension. i'm all for it, and i'd compile it myself but i can't even compile pcmanfm, so you've already outdone me there. but until someone creates an lxde extension, i hope you'll find a way to make a package from pcmanfm, i've wanted that for tc for a long time.