As you can see on my current desktop, I came back to fluxbox for my fresh Gentoo 2005.0 install:

Fluxbox is a lightweight but very powerful X Window Manager. It’s not as higly configurable as FVWM, but much much easier. Where the default config for FVWM shows an ugly desktop (think to the Solaris CDE), fluxbox has a nice look by default. And after some navigation through the configuration menu, you are in front of a real eye-candy desktop!!!

Now let speak about the nicest aspect: to install it in Gentoo, you only have to do one thing after emerging X11-xorg:

emerge fluxbox

There is only one “file” to emerge, and after some minutes, it’s done. However, if you intend to define some personal desktop background, you will need to emerge eterm as well (it’s a terminal emulator, but featuring a great background setup tool – fbsetbg).

You can find a complete installation guide for Gentoo here.