Kick Fat KDE/Gnome to the curb and get thin with Fluxbox
posted by CodeGirl
Think you can’t run Linux on an old pc you have laying around because of the bloated KDE/Gnome desktop “environments”? Luckily there’s a great alternative: Fluxbox + pypanel. I’m running it on an old P2 450 Mhz laptop. It’s not super speedy, but it’s perfect for web browsing, email, etc.
First off: You DO NOT NEED KDE OR GNOME! They are both nice looking with tons of eye candy, but all that “wow that looks cool!”-type stuff is sucking up all your ram and some of your CPU cycles. Toss it. All you need is a window manager (do you see that bar at the top of each of your windows, the one with the title in it and usually “X” and “_”…..thats the window manager doing that). However, if all you have is a window manager, you have a blank desktop and will probably feel a little lost. I know I did when I first dropped Gnome.
I started out using Blackbox as a window manager because I had read that it was nice and lightweight (ie easy on your system resources, such as RAM). After a little poking around with Google, I found Fluxbox. It is another window manager, and it is based off of an older version of Blackbox. I love Fluxbox because it 1) can rememeber what virtual desktop I open an app on, 2) groups together every “aterm” as I open them, 3) lets me assign key combos to do anything I want (like Alt-G to run Googlizer), 4) allows me to remove ALL window ‘decorations’ on any window I want (like a popup box like the ‘run’ window in Windoze), 5) supports transparent window title bars, toolbar and slit (get your mind out of the gutter, thats just what the creators decided to name it). I chose to turn off the Fluxbox toolbar (it didnt do everything I wanted). I also chose not to use the ’slit’ on my laptop (I do use it on my desktop where I have a nice 21″ monitor). I missed having a taskbar so I started looking around for a lightweight “panel” (thats what those gray bars are at the top and bottom of your screen if you use Gnome). Pypanel fits the bill perfectly. It has a taskbar, a clock, a “notification area” (like the Windoze ‘tray’), and a launcher.
I chose “fbpager” as my pager (lets you move around between virtual desktops and easily drag around windows between desktops) as it is 100% Fluxbox compatible. FBPager allows me to customize the exact size of the pager (so I can make it pretty small to help save space) and make it transparent (I just love transparent anything/everything);
To keep track of various system stats/info (like used/free ram, used/free disk space, CPU usage,etc) I found something called “Conky” for this purpose. It does 1 thing really, really well: I can choose to monitor darn near anything in darn near any manner…and it’s on all my desktops. In my Conky config, I have: *current CPU temp (so i can adjust when my laptop cooling fan comes on), *CPU usage (so I can see that the computer is just BUSY and not locked up), *RAM/Swap usage (so I can kill stuff when i start to use most of my ram….or when I have to restart just to get alleviate the memory leaks in various apps), *Upload/Download usage graphs for eth0 (so I can see if something has gone awry and sending out packets like mad), *Battery time (So I’m not caught unexpectedly with little/no battery power and I havent saved everything), *Disk space (so I can start cleaning out the cruft before things start blowing up due to a full disk)
If you miss having icons laying around on your desktop, you can use ‘fbdesk‘.
Enjoy all the ram you will now have free, so you can start up more applications
YOU CAN STILL RUN KDE AND GNOME APPS, however. You’ll just need the kde/gnome “base libraries”. If you are using most any distro you can try installing a program (like k3b for burning cds/dvds) and the kde libs should be automatically installed for you.
I use Ubuntu at the moment (you really should at least try the LiveCD if you havent already), and here’s more specifics on Fluxbox on Ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fluxbox
This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 12:46 pm and is filed under linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:39 pm
Xfce is also a good alernative to GNOME & KDE. It is essentially a full-on desktop
environment with a panel, graphical file manager etc, but I have run the latest version
on a Pentium 200 with 80Mb of RAM with no problems. In fact, when running Debian+
2.4 kernel+XFree86+XFce+Firefox, I’m still using around 32Mb! It can also be made to
look quite a lot like GNOME if you’re not a CDE fan (ahem)…
People seem to like all the transparency stuff in fluxbox though. Didn’t realize it can
basically be made into a desktop with the add-ons you describe.
James.
CodeGirl says:
James, good point. I had forgotten about XFCE. Ubuntu even has a distro (Xubuntu) that uses it. Making you aware of Fluxbox’s possibilties was my primary goal :) so I am glad you got something out of it, even if you do not choose to actually use the described setup.
August 3rd, 2006 at 12:28 am
Nice run down on Fluxbox. I’m a big Fluxbox fan, so I like to see it get any press it can. I stick with it the way god intended, though: just the toolbar. It does all I need, probably because I have gkrellm open at all times with a launcher and volume plug-in, etc. I just put Linux on a friend’s laptop, and the difference between KDE and Fluxbox on a 300 Mhz K6-2 processor with 128 MB of RAM is pretty substantial.
See ya,
joe f.
August 3rd, 2006 at 2:43 am
What dooes the author mean by Gnome? People seem to be confusing window managers with file managers with graphic toolkits etc. Gnome refers to a whole conglomeration of bits and pieces.
Fluxbox also is not just a single piece of software. Mainly its a window manager, but probably has a panel and a rudimentary desktop.
Gnome also contains some underlying libraries, such as Pango, GTK+, etc. But these libraries will be loaded if you run a Gnome application, regardless of what Window Manager you are using. If I run any application that is compiled against the Gnome libraries, then these libraries will be loaded.
The article probably only makes much sense if you run Fluxbox but no other graphical apps. Most mainstream apps use either GTK+ or QT (the KDE graphics lib), or some other equivalent graphics toolkit, which will still take up memory.
I think people are confused between the memory taken up by resident libraries and memory used by applications. Gnome does not load all its applications when it is run. Most of the Gnom apps are run from a menu. DOnt run them and they wont use up any memory.
Take away all the Gnome apps, and just run Metacity and fire up some non graphical apps from a terminal, and I doubt the difference between FLuxbox and Gnome will be noticed by most users.
CodeGirl says:
When I referred to “Gnome” I meant the default setup of the Gnome ‘desktop environment’ (which is how Ubuntu is installed), including Metacity and Nautilus and Gnome panels….everything.
Fluxbox actually *is* a single piece of software. It has no native support for desktop icons nor an application launcher. I understand about the inability to avoid GTK and other libs from loading/being used…I have no issue with them. I DO have an issue with the Gnome “panel” that takes up several MB when pypanel takes up a few kilobytes and does most of the same things. Nautilus is always loaded for example, kind of like Windows Explorer. I dont want/need it. I want the RAM back.
August 3rd, 2006 at 8:56 am
I use a similar combination: openbox and fbpanel.
I used to use fluxbox but i’m not sure it’s standards (EWMH?) compliant. It didn’t work seamlessly with fbpanel whereas openbox does. Does pypanel need python installed? Fbpanel’s requirements are fairly minimal i think.
Also, materm is a great lightweight tabbed terminal for these sort of lightweight environments.
CodeGirl says:
According to the Fluxbox website, they are much more EWMH compliant than previous versions. Pypanel does need python to work. When I first started with Fluxbox, fbpanel wasn’t very far along so I avoided it. According to its website, it appears to have all the same functions as Pypanel. I’m going to give it another try.
Multi-aterm isn’t quite “there” yet for me, feature-wise. I used gnome-terminal in the past, and I’m waiting until multi-aterm can get some similar features (like per-aterm profiling). I do use aterm as my terminal program however; I just use Fluxbox’s native tabbed windows to keep all my aterms together.
August 10th, 2006 at 11:14 am
i’m really interested in how to get fluxbox going. the part where i get stuck is how to to configure fluxbox from scratch, meaning, if i were to download and set it up, and want it to appear on gdm menu and successfully launch, how do i do it?
secondly, how do i get the menus populated, and set up the themes?
can you do a write-up on this?
thanks
ram
CodeGirl says:
Ram, I don’t have much free time at the moment to write that up. Rather than wait around for me, checkout the Fluxbox wiki.
Here’s how to install fluxbox from scratch:
http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php/How_to_build_fluxbox_from_source
Help with generating Fluxbox menus(you should have a basic one by default):
fluxbox-generate_menu -hHow to edit fluxbox menus:
http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php/Howto_edit_menu
How to edit the GDM menu to add fluxbox:
http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php/Howto_add_fluxbox_to_gdm
How to install fluxbox themes:
http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php/Howto_fluxStyle
(wish they had this when i first started out with Fluxbox)
I wrote the post before I knew of the existence of the Fluxbox wiki; sorry I didn’t mention it then.
One of the coolest features is ‘auto-grouping windows’. Each time a certain application opens a window, if there is already a window of the same application open, it glues itself to the existing one (no more making all your individual windows small just to get them on the same desktop. Example, I group my ‘aterm’s (my terminal program of choice simply by adding ‘aterm’ to the file ~/.fluxbox/group.
I added my fluxbox config files to my wiki for you to checkout if you are interested, here: http://wiki.thecodegirl.org/doku.php?id=files:fluxconf
Hope that helps
January 7th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Hey,
for the last to days I set up and customized my openbox installation and now i figured out, that it does not support any more the feature of moving windows without showing their content.
fuck!! This really sucks.
I was wondering whether fluxbox can use pypanel, so here I am…and coool it does…
tomorrow I boost my thinkpad with a new f*box installation.
by the way nice blog…I´ll explore it tomorrow…
cu,
dr.zombo