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Blackbox (Finally) Updated
mpeg4codec writes "OSNews reported earlier this month that the lightweight Blackbox window manager has been updated to 0.70. Among the new features are EWMH compliance, anti-aliased fonts, unicode support, and backwards compatibility with previous versions' styles. Of course, it brings you all these new features (well, some are optional) while retaining its small binary size, small memory footprint, and short list of dependencies. I for one think it's about time."
If you're trying to get Linux and X running on a minimalist platform, small size suddenly becomes very important. Small size also implies fast, and if you're working on real-time graphics, that's a big plus. I don't think it's something I'm going to want, but freedom of choice is an important part of Linux. I wish them the best of luck.
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Blackbox is an existing window manager -- it's been around longer than most of the ones that the kids drool over every time a screenshot gets posted. And this "bogus niche" seems to be rather large -- not only do many people use it on their desktop, but I've seen it being used in commercial settings on several occasions. How about you do something productive with your time, rather than complaining when somebody decides to devote their energy into something besides the newest Windows / OSX clone window manager?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Nope, next update is to Emacs so the whole Emacs/VI holy war can erupt and somebody can poke there head up and say pico or joe.
Don't laugh, the new (CVS) version of GNU Emacs uses GTK+ and integrates into GNOME or XFCE quite nicely (except for keybindings, of course, which can be changed to suit). I'm quite keen for the next version to actually arrive - comiling from CVS is all well and good, but it isn't exactly a stable finished product.
Jedidiah.
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Well, Blackbox is a little different. First off, Blackbox is a window manager. KDE is a DE, hence the DE in the name. KWin doesn't really get all that many bugs. It's had a total of about a thousand in three years, about one a day. And most of those didn't matter.
It is also important to note that I have never had BB crash. Never. I don't use it anymore, I use KDE. However, when I ran BB for about a year, it never crashed. I occasionally got bothered with having to add everything I wanted manually and having trouble configuring it, but there weren't any 'bugs', just wishlist type items. BB really has been stable basically forever because it has always had an extremely precise goal that was well scoped from the start.
And as for this not mattering to many users, BB is one of the landmark WMs, truly. Just look at how many people use the BB forks. It's one of the all-time favorite WMs out there, and even today, after all this time, is the best looking. It definitely is newsworthy when BB gets a new release.
Extended Window Manager Hints (or something like that, the letters don't match up)
Anyway, basically it means that the WM is more or less compatable with GNOME or KDE.
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
Blackbox worked great on my old Duron box. Its as close as you can get to being in the console while in X.
But literally yesterday, I was configuring X for a new system with an LCD monitor. My distro had the old version of Blackbox -- without anti-aliasing fonts (*gak*). I use the console most of the time to save my eyes. No anti-aliasing on a LCD monitor is almost as bad as using X on a old monitor.
I did alot of hand-wringing over it -- I think fluxbox may have too much eye-candy -- but I switched.
More power to Blackbox though, the concept is still the best.
What next? An update to linuxconf? An update to fvwm95?
Linuxconf: Last release: 1.34r3 2005-01-18 12:08:47
"Don't feed the trolls"
"... no rush to upgrade... "
Normally I'd agree. In this case, blackbox being as lightweight as it is, and having very little in the way of external dependencies, I went for the upgrade as soon as I saw it. Not a mistake per se, except that almost none of the stock styles work properly (read: invisible menu text, font/border/margin sizes changing wildly). Fortunately, one of the stock styles still worked well enough to navigate. I drilled through the new wiki site to find the 'full example' style for 0.70 and dropped that in. The second unfortunate turn is that the full example also has the invisible text problem. After about an hour of tweaking and paring down it was usable, but the whole experience leaves me with, "yep, you're right to hold off on this one."
Of course, it's possible that there are some conflicts with old (0.65) files on that box...
Let S_n = {nst+us+vt : s,t in Z \ {0}, u,v in {-1,1}}. For all n in Z where |n| > 2, Z \ S_n is infinite... right?
I like how I can use Blackbox for windows and use the same themes.
:)
http://www.bb4win.org/news.php
People walk up and seem me using rxvt from cygwin and bb4win and they dont realize im in windows, till I open Exchange.
It took me a while, but I managed to find out what EWMH is (the linked page wasn't very helpful, didn't even explain the acronym):
From this page:
The EWMH, or Extended Window Manager Hints is a freedesktop.org- developed standard to support a number of conventions for communication between the window manager and clients. It builds on and extends the ICCCM (See Section 3). A copy of the current EWMH standard is available at http://freedesktop.org/Standards/wm-spec/
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. - Will Duran
Of hand, does anyone know of a WM that's relaly easy to customize, but also very flexible?
Easy and flexible are opposites, unfortunately. Something like Blackbox allows you to define a few gradients and call it finished, but you don't get a lot of flexibility. KWin allows you to do *anything*, but you have to write your own plugin. Towards the easy side you also have IceWM and Windowmaker, while towards the flexible side you have Metacity and Fvwm.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
A fun comparison I did
No Xinerama support in BlackBox yet? Ug...
Blackbox has had Xinerama support ever since 0.65, perhaps even before.
http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/BlackboxFeaturei ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Unfortunately fluxbox has a really crappy alt-tab model that the developers don't want to fix. If it wasn't for that fluxbox might be a useful replacement.