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"OpenSSH now has a blacklist feature for weak Debian-generated ssh keys." From: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/community/release2_0.shtml Please do just a LITTLE bit of research before posting.

Please do some research before telling someone else to do research before posting.

DragonflyBSD is a fork of FreeBSD and not exactly mainstream so you can hardly accuse me of not being aware of what it said. Further, apart from that remark on the page you linked-to claiming that "OpenSSH contains a blacklist feature", there's nothing to suggest that OpenSSH itself actually contains any such blacklist management.

My research: There's nothing in the OpenSSH ChangeLog at ftp://ftp.plig.org/pub/OpenBSD/OpenSSH/portable/ChangeLog which mentions blacklisting and there's nothing in the source tarball either. I've looked (both the core distribution and the portable version).

It may be that DragonflyBSD includes blacklist management, but if so, they didn't get it from OpenSSH.

I raised the bug https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1469 because I thought that such a feature should be included. If the OpenSSH developers were interested in supporting this, I'm sure they'd have (a) commented on the bug and (b) written the code or used some of the contributed code. They may well have good reasons for not including this, but they haven't commented either way.

E17 perhaps? Maybe some day... Enlightenment rocks. Here are a couple of screen shots of mine from back in 1999 (my other name back in the day was EvilGNU): http://xwinman.org/screenshots/enl-dfree.jpg and http://xwinman.org/screenshots/enl-dfree2.jpg

Enlightenment was the only reason I ever brought up a Linux machine at home. I was perfectly content with the BSD machines I had access to.

http://www.plig.org/xwinman/screenshots/enlightenment.jpg

that's the shot that made me "fall in love."

I mean, GNOME is nice and all, but seriously -- chasing after Windows' look and feel to try and bring in "converts" for some ill-defined reason seems doomed to failure to me. Show me something totally cool and awesome -- that's what got me, although I got my first UNIX exposure when I was 12 and was Captain of my high school's computer programming team (C/C++) for 3 years in a row, and captain of my college's ACM Team B my freshman year. I'd have ended up with it anyway. But to a 13/14 year old kid, Enlightenment screenshots were the sort of thing that made me go "so THAT'S what I can do!"

The rio (1) window manager gives me flashbacks to TWM, and gawdy color schemes inspired by 256-color displays.... More screen shots here. I'm not saying GNOME or KDE have the best look either. I actually was happy with OpenLook / OLVWM. If I have to go to a window manager look that's 10-15 years old, can I go to that one instead? :-) (Of course, anyone can make any window manager look bad.)

The rio (1) window manager gives me flashbacks to TWM, and gawdy color schemes inspired by 256-color displays.... More screen shots here. I'm not saying GNOME or KDE have the best look either. I actually was happy with OpenLook / OLVWM. If I have to go to a window manager look that's 10-15 years old, can I go to that one instead? :-) (Of course, anyone can make any window manager look bad.)

Actually, it more closely resembles C D E than OS X. And CDE definately predates OS X.

Actually, it more closely resembles C D E than OS X. And CDE definately predates OS X.

Actually, it more closely resembles C D E than OS X. And CDE definately predates OS X.

XPDE, for one.

Mind, it's got the uncanny valley problem after a fashion. It looks, sometimes a lot, like WinXP. But it's decidedly different in subtle (and not so subtle) ways. In balance, I'd think the result is more unsettling rather than less. You're better off with an environment that uses familiar motifs, but doesn't just ape another model.

There are a large number of desktops for Linux, and most of them are highly themable. KDE and GNOME are probably the leaders, and both are highly themeable. I found XFCE4 is really popular among kids (6-18), and prefer WindowMaker myself: clean, configurable, light, stable, and out of my face.

My laptop is a 166MHz with 96MB of RAM and a 1.6GB hard drive. Running Debian.

With a 266MHz system, you're going to need to be careful about the weight of the software you run.

First, skip any of the major Office varieties for Linux (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc.) ... they'll all run hideously slow. If you can, do you word processing as plain text. If you absolutely need formatting (and you're not handy with LaTeX and related apps like Lyx), use HTML. Raw code is good, but if that doesn't work for you, try Bluefish (requires X). Once you're on a desktop system, you can import it into OpenOffice or Word, where you can make any additional formatting changes you need.

If your laptop can take more RAM, install it. You'll need it. For my ThinkPad 760XL, installation of the SO-DIMMS wasn't too hard.

If you possibly can, do without X. That'll save you a world of time, especially when loading your OS off a USB flash disk. If you need X, go with a lightweight windowmanager, like twm. If that's a bit too extreme, try oroborus.

You're going to want as little memory footprint as possible. However, you're still probably going to need swap space, so I'd recommend against a flash device. Get one of the USB hard drives.

That's all I can really think of ATM.

Also, Microsoft often seem reluctant to go after people for interface copying - remember fvwm95, a window manager for X which cloned (at the pixel level, mostly) the windows 95 look'n'feel?

I was maybe a tad harsh, given you weren't actually originally planning on showing those screenshots to the whole of slashdot :)

It's just that kde can look as 'lickable' as any other desktop these days, and when so many people line up to slag of kde and linux in general, I want to jump up and down and say 'linux can look pretty, honest! It doesn't all have to be pixellated fonts and monochrome boxes!

Anyway, kudos for the effort you put into it, hopefully it'll get a few more people seing the power of a kde desktop - lets just hope they're not put off by the twm style colour scheme ;)

Here's the Google cache.

Since google cache doesnt show gfx, and you want to see some pictures, go check out xwinman, a nice list of different types of xwindow managers and a history of each. Not everything has to be a GUI for a microsoft OS. http://www.plig.org/xwinman/

Whatever.

Rhapsody has nothing on this.

Ha! I got modded as a Troll!

Would anyone seriously consider TWM to be more attractive than anything from Apple?

ROTFLMAO!

The sarcasm-challenged are out tonight!

Whatever.

Rhapsody has nothing on this.

Here's a screenshot of a CTWM desktop from 1998 with "multiple scaled desktops" ala Apple Expose (clunkly looking I know, but look at the window titled "WorkSpaceManager"). This feature of the CTWM virtual desktop functionality has been part of CTWM since about 1996, I believe. The virtual desktops have been there since about 92. Also, according to one article I read, this feature in CTWM was inspired by an HP window manager that came before it called "VUEwm", presumably in the late 80's.

Wasn't that ctwm?

I've seen some pretty unusual Windows desktops at Customize.org which use third party applications to replace everything from the Windows shell to system fonts. There's a handy little utility called Resource Hacker which lets you edit Windows executable files, allowing almost infinite customization. Some of the finer results of using Resource Hacker can be seen in the tutorials here.

As for the UNIX desktop front, everything these days seems to want to copy the better points of the MacOS and Windows. A notable exception is XFCE which is a Gtk2/Gnomed clone of CDE. If you wanna see some odd attempts at user interfaces, I urge you to check out some of the others at http://www.plig.org/xwinman/ (yes the site still exists and is actually fairly recent). I honestly believe this site is a MUST READ for anyone that is going to use UNIX on the desktop).

Dude, here's a list of window managers for you.

Please do yourself a favor and try blackbox (or fluxbox) on your machine.
Use galeon (or links) for browsing.
Maybe look into mutt for E-Mail.
You'll like it.

I dunno why everybody keeps complaining about "old hardware". Esp. old notebooks can be so damn useful.
Okay, KDE on a p133 is a bit *cough* optimistic. But who needs KDE anyhow..

Third or fourth?
There are many more.

Point him in the direction of Blackbox. Nearly as slim as TWM, while actually looking reasonably good.

That said, Linux or BSD with olvwm or XFce can be made to look so much like Solaris that most users won't care, and the hardware compatibility won't be a problem. I guess it depends on what is more important in a given context, really.

There's a fairly good list of available window managers over at plig.org. It may take some sifting to find what you're looking for, but then again, you'll have to sift through /. too...

There's a fairly good list of available window managers over at plig.org. It may take some sifting to find what you're looking for, but then again, you'll have to sift through /. too...

X is not a window manager. It is an X server. It is properly called the X Window System, which XFree86 is an implementation of. You can familiarize yourself with X and window managers here. HTH. HAND.

Minor nitpick: I first used a taskbar with CDE, well before 1995. CDE wasn't just a WM (the WM in CDE was MWM). Check out the CDE "taskbar". It lists applications you can start, and virtual desktops. No actively running "tasks".

Here is a page with some info and links to other screenshots

Still, FVWM95 has not helped Linux to penetrate the corporate desktop market even though FVWM95 has been available for at least 3 years.

However, there is good news. The vehicle that is helping Linux to penetrate the corporate desktop market is the powerful 80x86 chips by Intel and AMD. Numerous small American companies (like those in Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128) are moving en masse away from Unix workstations with crappy processors like UltraSPARC to Linux desktops with powerful processors like the Pentium 4, the Athlon, and the PPC 970.

In fact, the CEO of one company developing radio-frequency chips deploys only Linux desktops and servers. The Linux desktops are powered by Pentium 4s. To quote her, "Linux running on an 80x86 chip creates a desktop that gives 3x the performance and 1/3 the cost of a Sun workstation."

The bell tolls. It tolls ominously for Sun.

Actually, more like a fork of bowman, which in turn was a fork of fvwm.

See this page:

AfterStep is based on Fvwm, but it is designed to emulate some of the look and feel of the NEXTSTEP(R) user interface, while adding useful, requested, and neat features. It started life under the name of Bowman, by Bo Yang, but has since moved past simple emulation and into a niche as its own valuable window manager.

I suspect that the IP they're referring to isn't just source code. Off the top of my head, for example, check out this fvwm95 screenshot. I'm sure MS considers the Windows UI as its intellectual property, and though IANAL I suspect they may be right.

Sorry mate but that's not quite right. KDE is not a window manager but a desktop environment (the DE part of KDE). KDE by default uses a window manager called KWin.

For alternatives to the bloat of KDE and GNOME, look here

Shouldn't OSS be about solving problems that people want to work on rather than trying to be a cloning engine for Microsoft software?

Bingo. Sometimes I shake my head at the lengths people go to bash M$ at every chance they get, then spend tons of effort to clone them. The first blatent one was when RH shipped thier default windowing system to be FVWM95. I still havn't gotten over that one. KDE and to an extent GNOME are not too far behind either. For example. Why in the world do they put the start thingy/taskbar/icon collector at the bottom of the screen? Because M$ put it there first. Take a look at your browser. See all the menus up top there? See the titlebar to move the window and close it etc? Shouldn't the taskbar be up there too?

Look at StarOffice and OpenOffice. They seem familiar. And there are plenty of others, but I think you get the point.

Another thing that M$ gets bashed on here is because they "embrace and extend". Many, many open source projects do exactly this.

Don't get me wrong. I like OS and there are beautiful examples of its success, like Apache, Linux, Galeon/Mozilla. The last one is an excellent example. I never thought of what I would want out of a browser, I just knew they all sucked a few years ago. However, Galeon is exactly what I want out of a browser.

So, what software do I use on a daily basis? Linux for an OS, WindowMaker for a window manager, mutt for email, vim for an editor, and lord forbid a closed source calendar called corporatetime. I believe that Oracle bought this, its difficult to find info about it anymore.

So what is my point? I get along just fine without M$ nor do I use any software that really has a M$ equivalent. Why do these topics come up all the time? Maybe we should be cloning M$'s slogan too. "Where do you want to go today?" It is a fitting question, right now the answer seems to be "Wherever M$ was yesterday?"

"What would really be cool is if some of the GUI concepts made it over to Linux..."

They already have. Have a look at these:
9wm - a window manger that acts like 8 1/2 from Plan 9
Wily - a clone of Plan 9s programmers editor, Acme (v cool)
There's also WindowLab, another window manager which uses the same window resizing system as Plan 9.

I'm sure there's more that I don't know of...

My first experience with Unix-esque systems and X-Windows was in 1993 when I started college. At the time my choice was TWM or FVWM. FVWM was clearly the more advanced option and one of the more advanced window managers at the time. (CDE looked advanced, but was more of a hassle than it was worth.)

Since then I've tended to be lazy and taken what I was given, stuck with whatever was the default. As a result I spend a long time with Enlightenment followed by SawFish/SawMill. I've dabbled with a number of other window managers.

Then last year (2002), I took a job back at my old university. The default was still FVWM! And while FVWM had matured, it remained instantly identifable. I hadn't used it in five years, but it came back instantly. It felt right. Sure, it lacks classy menus, but the configuration file was easy enough to use and let me set things up how I wanted. Most window managers are determined to stick the various window management buttons where they want them. FVWM makes it easy to stick them where I want them. It's a minimal WM, I don't run any of the modules except for the pager (to switch between virtual desktops) and the IconMan, a very minimal list of windows on each desktop. My desktop is spartan and I've discovered that I really like it.

"Nostalgically twm would be more cool. fvwm, fvwm2, fvwm95, icewm, sawfish are the 'other' window managers."

Actually, I think twm would be an 'other' as well. I believe the original window manager was xwm.

http://www.plig.org/xwinman/others.html

trust me there's nothing elite about Tab window manager, as far as I know anyhow. it's a bit dated, but i still like it, and it works just fine even on a machine with low resources..

Not quite a screenshot history for X, but you can view a lot of screenshots for different X window managers that have been around over at: http://www.plig.org/xwinman/.

You're looking for FVWM95. Now go install it before you or they have finished compiling the binaries.

I think one of Linux' weak points is that it doesn't offer any real *alternative* when it comes to the GUI. I think Linux needs some sort of wildly different GUI, perhaps not even based on the WIMP metaphore.

has it been so long already, that the Great X11 Window Manager Chaos is beginning to be forgotten?

say, here's a beginner's guide sort of site for you. for the really exotic, not-even-WIMP-based ideas you'd really need a completely redesigned and rewritten application suite, which would take some little time to create, but a few of the more... exotic... WM's already out there might be good starting points. TreeWM, maybe Ion, maybe PWM, perhaps 3Dwm. or just go googling for "window manager", see how long that'll keep you busy...

maybe it's a sign of getting old, when you can clearly remember the days of "unix has too many GUIs!" and seeing the good point that was therein made.

1. Shell: bash
2. Distribution: Debian or Redhat
3. Window Manager: Blackbox or WindowMaker
4. Browser: Galeon

• screenshot of mwm
• screenshot of 4dwm

• screenshot of mwm
• screenshot of 4dwm

I'm not arguing about those innovations. I'm asking for someone to show me a UI environment that doesn't look like Windows! And I'm not talking about a skinned window manager. I'm talking about something really innovative unlike all the other desktops out there.

Here is a collection of window managers. There are some for all flavors. First, notice there is one for just about every other operating system standard. One for Plan9, one for Amiga (and IceWN), one for NeXT (actually, several). I know - no innovation.

Then see Enlightenment Windowmanager, which added anti-aliasing and alpha-blending BEFORE Windows and Mac did (no alpha-blending for them), as well as non-regular shaped widgets for your windows. Then pwn and FluxBox with tabbing on all windows.

But User Interfaces HAVE NOT been innovative for much of anything for about 20 years since Mac came out looking a lot like Xerox PARC. But, see the list, there are lots to go from. My favorite are the minimal memory consumption ones, like Blackbox and pwm and twm, but there is something for everyone. Unlike Windows or Mac, where you can have any flavor you like as long as it is vanilla.

Firstly, there's a big difference between Ford copying Porsche's features and an OSS / FS project copying Apple's features. Ford is commercial and competes with Porsche. OSS / FS projects are not commercial and don't compete.

Secondly, as you implied, Ford could have come out with rounded headlights the next year, or day; just it would have to be their own implementation of them. Similarly, the Aqua themes I've seen so far for Linux or Windows are not copies of Apple's implementation of a glassy/bluish look & feel; they're different, separately generated, implementations.

The idea that a "look and feel" can be patented & copyrighted is absurd. Xerox was trying to make that point when they sued Apple because Apple sued MS for "ripping off their look and feel"; essentially, Xerox said that you shouldn't legally be able to own the rights to a look and feel.

Think about how backwards what your saying is. You want a world where one person discovers something useful, and then no one else can use that something without paying them. Its like saying that if I find a better way to do business, and that becomes widely known, I can prevent anyone else from doing business that way.

The entire market is dependant to some extent upon competitors copying eachothers efforts. This is the only way you can create real competition.

Yes, I know the only thing that makes the GPL work is copyright law. However, the GPL is a brilliant tool designed by Stallman to use Intellectual Property laws against themselves, so to speak. It is not the end goal. The end goal is to either eliminate intellectual property all-together, or vastly reduce its duration and scope.

As for being an ass, I call it as I see it; if I think someone's full of it, I'll say so.

As for a dock before NeXT, what do you call this in TWM?

A huge breakthrough would be to ONLY RAISE THE WINDOW WHEN THE USER CLICKS ON THE TITLE. In particular stop raising it on clicks, and don't raise it when a child window is raised!

Try twm (again)!

This link is pretty good.

There's a lot of good work being done in window managers, and most of them are a lot less resource-hungry than GNOME or KDE. (My particular favorite is Enlightenment, mainly because I find the design very creative.) Of course, they all cater to folks with a serious let-me-tweak-everything mindset. But then, who else wants to run a GUI on old box that most people would just throw out?

Try:
http://www.plig.org/xwinman/index.html

There are them all.

• CTWM homepage
  
• Window Managers for X
  

Have you tried the Aminet? It's right here.

One TWM I've not seen mentioned here is CTWM, which is a TWM I used for quite a while after TWM.

It actually stands for "Claude's Tab Window Manager", which is rather funny given how they took out "Tom" The two things I liked most were the virtual screens (I think one of the first, but I'm not sure about that), and the color support...

It had great support for customizing the look of the WM with pixmaps and various colors, and I think more options that TWM had - I remember having nice gradient shaded menus. I think it also had the easiest to use virtual room support of anything I've ever tried since, but I haven't used that feature in the newer VM's much and have been too lazy to really customize my WM as much as I used to.

I like to think of TWM as the "VI" of WM's, as no matter what machine you connect to you know TWM will be there and it's easy to use (OK, in one way it's like VI...). I use TWM all the time when connecting to various machines around the company if I'm using a lightweight X server like WierdX on an NT box.