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.

A few months from now, I began my quest to the holy window manager…I switched from Gnome to Fluxbox, trying out XFCE, Window Maker, Enlightenment, KDE, Kahakai, Ice WM, and maybe others…

This quest ended soon when I discovered FVMW….

FVWM is one of the greatest Window Manager available for linux. You can configure it so that it fullfil all your needs and expectations.
The only drawback: it’s not easy to configure (I mean, not so easy as Gnome…).

But if you look at these screenshots, or maybe these, you will soon realize it’s the Window Manager YOU want!

Features go from multi desktop (I know, it’s common in linux) to full transparency in the menu, from heavily configurable keyboards shortcuts to switch to next desktop as the mouse leave the current one (sometime boring…I admit 😉 ), and in menu file browsing…

In another words… Try it out!

I leave the word of the end to my current desktop.

Ok, let’s create a new category, to speak about Linux, Window Managers (Gnome, FVMW, KDE…) and Appz in general…