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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."
Too bad that Fluxbox has already killed it off.
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Blackbox has been working great on my machines for 4+ years. This new version looks kind of neat but I'm in no rush to upgrade just for AA fonts. EWMH complance doesn't mean anything to me.
So I went over to the screenshot site (second one from the bottom) and was under-impressed with what they had displayed. I said to myself, "Self, this looks like any other WM." To which I replied, "Yep."
I guess you could say I was crazy, but maybe I'm missing something here. What does this offer that other WMs don't offer?
And it just occurred to me that "small size" is not really a big selling point. Maybe if this was on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM, memory footprint would become a big deal, but if I'm running a system with an actual window manager, not to mention a window server like X, the least of my worries is lack of memory.
Who trusts something that moves so slow? I mean unless it's perfect or have the means to fix it yourself... unless it already does 100% of what you you 100% well.
If I report an annoying bug when will it get fixed? If I request a feature when will I get a response?
While KDE may not be perfect my bugreports get responded too fairly quickly and it's getting better all the time.
Perhaps, there is something that Fluxbox or Openbox (which appears dead..) can use I don't see this benefiting anyone but a few users and thus not really news worthey. Perhaps for embedded kiosk or something...
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Looking at their homepage (assuming you still can, as this is an early post), it looks as if nothing's been updated since November of 2004. The new version is available on the download page, though you'd think they'd post something to the effect of ".70 is now up" right on the front page.
I can only assume these cats are looking to keep a low profile, or to keep a static homepage that they never have to touch.
Nuances of their site design and motives aside, I'm enticed to try this out.
Ignore the rantings above. Poster is an idiot.
How is this informative?
Okay... so my post will be ultra-informative:
Openbox is where it's at. It's lightweight, fast, and has more essential features that blackbox is missing.
Fluxbox is where it's at. It's lightweight, fast, and has more essential features that blackbox is missing.
Enlightenment is where it's at. It's lightweight, fast, and has more essential features that blackbox is missing.
FVWM is where it's at. It's lightweight, fast, and has more essential features that blackbox is missing.
Window Maker is where it's at. It's lightweight, fast, and has more essential features that blackbox is missing.
Metacity is where it's at. It's lightweight, fast, and has more essential features that blackbox is missing.
Ratpoison is where it's at. It's lightweight, fast, and has more essential features that blackbox is missing.
and so on...
nil
Maybe there's hope for the Duke yet!
Yet another freaking window manager for Linux. Why not improve on the existing ones instead of trying to fill bogus niches.
First of all, this is an update. So, they did improve on an existing one.
Second, different people have different needs/preferences for WMs, hence the wide variety. IMHO the variety is a strength not a weakness.
nil
Call me silly, but the WM & Desktop Environment should have a matching theme.
I know it's a matter of taste, but I can't stand it when I have one theme for my Window Manager, and a second theme for all those applications which run within the windows... it's ugly, less functional, and way, way outdated.
I suppose that BlackBox & IceWM might be faster then the default KDE or Gnome WM's, but performance isn't usually a big issue for me.
Although, I can see the benefit when I need to run a remote X application on a remote server, and I don't want a full fledged Gnome or KDE environment... just X, a lightweight WM over a SSH connection.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
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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I realize that the preferred technique of debate here is a flurry of ad hominems followed by a couple slippery slope arguments and wrapped up with a huge leap of logic. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Well, yes, actually there is something wrong with it. By automatically labelling anyone who doesn't agree with you as "a knob" or "astroturfer" or some other epithet, you automatically end any rational debate. Maybe after several dozen posts it may be useful to end a debate with a well-formed insult, but to start off the debate by denigrating anyone who doesn't agree with you is hardly a recipe for enlightenment.
This kind of thing happens so much on Slashdot that I guess it's just considered the norm. How sad it is that this chance for rational discussion of WM merits (and your post actually does have some good points about the merits or lack thereof of Blackbox) into a name calling match.
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?
Make that, "Fluxbox and Openbox *were* much better than Blackbox anyways!"
Blackbox just released, and those features they noted as being added really *are* cool. In the lightweight WM market, it really is a penny-ante game: No one can add too much, because that makes them not lightweight. Blackbox caught up a lot of ground in this release and could take back its crown with relatively little trouble.
The people who built the later cathedrals in the rennaiscance were of the same opinion. Backed by incredibly wealthy patrons and a surplus of masons, they laughed at earlier era's notions of simplicity. The least of their worries was running out of ink on the blueprints, or running out of tasks for the artisans to perform. "More curliques!" was their battle cry.
And thus they invented Baroque. It's a nice style, if you're into that kind of thing. But it's hardly a universal aesthetic.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Yeah. What are we paying these opensource developers for anyway? Oh, wait...
How exactly is this going to enable me to make free long distance calls?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
And it doesn't have all the hideous widgets from Gtk based WMs. They sure are ugly.
Au Contraire! My favorite Window Manager, XFCE, shows how a GTK+ Window Manager can be created while still looking beautiful.
I originally chose XFCE because it had low memory requirements and had much of the same polish that existed in CDE. At the time, neither KDE or GNOME had both features. (I'd go as far as to say that GNOME had neither.) Since I first started using it, though, XFCE has become more attractive and even more polished with time. It probably won't run as well on a 16MB P120 as the original versions, but it would probably give GNOME and KDE a good run on a 64MB machine.
FWIW, I do like how far GNOME and KDE have come. GNOME can feel very pleasent to work in, but only if the distro preconfigures it correctly. The default installation is crap.
KDE, OTOH, is more beautiful than ever. It's applications are solid, its installation easy, and its capabilities top notch. It's just too bad that they've never worked the kinks out of that "too much cluttered 3D" feel it has.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It's about time it came out with EWMH .. I've already switched to fluxbox (yeah, and fluxgen is a very helpful guy on irc).
You might want to say that Forking is bad for the health of any project - but sometimes such branching off can keep a project alive. If there hadn't been a fluxbox - I'd have dumped blackbox for good.
Is there any reason for blackbox anymore ?. (well, other than the "choice" factor).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
at least you had the common sense to leave out Gnome and KDE from your rant. :D
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
....a Metacity theme that would work well on an 800x600 display. (it's a laptop, it's paid for, it runs Linux quite well with the exception of Metacity/GTK's insistance on using HUGE buttons)
FWIW, XP looks and runs fine. If I could just get the same sizing, this laptop would be rid of the Microsoft scurge. Believe me, I'm SO feckin' fed up with MS.
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
Remember, you didn't pay for this, so don't go disrespecting someone's hard work just because it doesn't update enough for you. There are people who like blackbox. And besides, it's just kind of a cool window manager.
I prefer the likes of BadWM. Sadly, though, it is in dire need of an update. People are working on it, sorta :/ BadWM is what a minimalistic WM should be (IMHO) - no window decorations except for a border around the window, quick keyboard commands, and it handles virtual desktops. I really don't like having a titlebar on my windows.
:P
I've been using Ion2 recently, and it isn't too bad either.. it's fast, although switching from BadWM to a tiling WM is a bit difficult
As far as those saying WMs shouldn't have to worry about memory footprints.. I have 768 megs of RAM, and I still don't like a WM that hogs RAM. I do memory-intensive work, and I don't want my WM taking up all my RAM just so it can look pretty. Even if I had 2 gigs of RAM, I'd still prefer BadWM or Ion2.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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
xfwm4 kicks ass. I was trying out xfce today but I miss my usb and cdrw drives popping up on my desktop when I put them in. I realized the only thing I really wanted was a faster full-featured gtk2 terminal and xfwm4 (metacity sux). It's fast, light, and has builtin support for x compositing!, So now I'm using xfterm4 on gnome with xfwm4 with a customized 0 pixel border theme. Who needs window borders when you have dropshadows to distinguish the window edge?
In Soviet Russia, the window manages YOU!
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"
- It seemed to take much longer to start (with my FC3 setup on a Thinkpad T21)
- Not all of the old themes looked as nice as they used to (buttons looked somewhat weird, etc.)
- The bulky, *nice*, new anti-aliased fonts bugged me. If I wanted to have the same look as GNOME and KDE, I wouldn't have been using blackbox.
So overall, I much prefer 0.65... But for the built-in features + look that I use, Fluxbox is a better choice for me.Believe it or not, I really did enjoy using CDE on my old Sun Ultras. It looked terrible, but the overall feel of the system was extremely solid and pleasent to work with. My only real complaint with it was how Sun added features by kit bashing command line utilities and Java programs into the WM. Would it have killed them to write a proper volume control instead of using the immature JMF control? Not to mention the *need* for a Winzip type of archive tool.
:-)
Still, beggars can't be choosers, and CDE blew the hell out of early KDE and GNOME.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This is important to me as I'm running linux on a playstation 2. I use mwm which I've always liked since I first used it quite some time ago. The binary clocks in at 1985399 bytes. In my research I've compiled and tried many different wms, one being blackbox which clocked in at 7965606 bytes, about 4x the size of mwm. Maybe I didn't compile it with some minimalist options turned on? Don't get me wrong I feel blackbox is a great product, but so far mwm is the best fit for my sit.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned pekwm, which just released a new dev release not to long ago.
. png
http://pekwm.org/
Here's a shot: http://img9.exs.cx/img9/885/pekwmdevpypanelrox9ss
Emacs and Vi are now the same program. Just make viper-mode your default in Emacs. Amazingly, the command sets for Emacs and Vi are almost disjoint, so you can use both at the same time. It really works.
Very Good!
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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.
I keep seeing posts that complain that "Well, this is great if memory is a problem, but for me it isn't so here's a list of reasons why I wouldn't never use it..." Why post useful drivel like this? (Oh, right, slashdot...) If your machine can handle a heavy GUI, you're *probally* going to use KDE/Gnome (or maybe XFCE). If you use a computer that's less than 600mhz, you're probally going to use Blackbox, Openbox, Fluxbox, etc. Or, once again, maybe XFCE (It's sexy, isn't it? ;))
This is really great to see that they're trying to update the light WMs, while still letting them remain useful in the same way they (hopefully) will always be: A good way to revive old hardware w/o having to install Windows NT or 98.
why didn't they call it Blackbox 1.0? :)
So, I'm reading lots of comments here about how people have nice new computers with lots of RAM & fast CPUs, so they don't need to worry about memory footprint etc. I call BS. Just because you have good enough hardware to cope with bloatware is no reason to use bloatware. My desktop at home is an Athlon64 3200+ w/ 2 GiB RAM. It could handle any WM I choose to throw on it. I choose lightweight WMs (fluxbox, currently), and I will try the new blackbox. Not because I'm limited by my hardware, but because I prefer the clean design that is inherant in lightweight WMs. And I don't use or want many of the features and eyecandy in some of the heavier WMs, so there's no reason for me to use one, even though my hardware could handle it easily.
Now, don't get me wrong, if you prefer KDE or Gnome or Enlightenment or whatever over blackbox, then that's fine; but don't use "I have good hardware" as a reason not to use a lightweight WM. Say "I like X, which lightweight WMs don't have" and I will respect you. Disagree, likely, but I will respect your opinion.
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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!
Before that I think it was Enlightenment.
Enlightenment was never the window manager for GNOME. In the beginning GNOME eschewed all forms of standard window managers. Any window manager was sufficient (as long as it followed the horrible GNOME window manager specs, but I digress). Enlightenment was popular because it had a lot of eyecandy, but it was never the official window manager for GNOME.
Then along came Redhat, who decried that Enlightenment should be the official WM for GNOME. Rasterman told Redhat to get stuffed and took off. The Havoc thought, "gee we should have a standard window manager, that way we could make our sucky WM specs even worse than they already are", and sawfish/sawmill was born.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
RAM? The main advantage here is that the files take up little *drive space*. This is optimal for something like a Live MiniCD/Flash drive distro that needs all the space available for killer packages.
Where do you get off saying something like, "I for one think it's about time"? Did you contribute even a single line of code to get it to this point?
Please show a little gratitude to the developers. They're volunteers, after all.
A fun comparison I did
Did you enable laptop_mode? I find that running the default laptop_mode script (in linux/Documentation/laptop_mode.txt) with "noatime" set in fstab for all partitions reduced disk activity hugely.
Blackbox is extremely stable, has no footprint...
No footprint? That's about as amazing and cool as write-only memory!
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
And it just occurred to me that "small size" is not really a big selling point.
The spam in my inbox begs to differ.
I used to be a rabid blackbox user, and helped contribute a patch or two (both to blackbox and to ROX-Filer so it would play well with blackbox). The big selling point for me was its small memory footprint -- this was especially important on my aging 366MHz machine.
However, a couple years ago, it felt like development towards 0.70 had stalled... and this after being on 0.65 for a year or two. I started investigating other window managers, just to see what was out there.
I discovered that xfwm4 had a similar footprint, but was already emwh compliant and offered some great eye candy as well. Not long after, I started trying OroboROX (visit the ROX website's software index for links to it). OroboROX offers similar functionality to xfwm4 with an even smaller footprint.
When I saw 0.70 had come out a few weeks ago, I wanted to see how things had progressed. It's certainly a nice window manager, and the emwh compliance is very well done. However, I did some benchmarking against OroboROX... and discovered that OroboROX actually used a smaller memory footprint than the new blackbox! And still has more eye candy!
So, kudos to blackbox, for finally getting to the 0.70 release... but I won't be using it.
"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."
Nope. First off, small size does not imply fast. Plenty of applications trade memory footprint for a speed gain (e.g. by keeping often used data in-core).
Second, real-time graphics depends on the X server, integrated hardware acceleration features and other non-window manager issues. There's really no window manager component in the performance of real-time graphics.
That was actually the beauty of the ICCCM: the job of the window manager as a client of the X server was isolated out, such that its duties were all user-driven. Your window manager doesn't HAVE to be small and/or fast in order for your applications to be.
Fluxbox is a window manager. Gnome is a desktop environment.
Please stop confusing the two. You can, quite legitimately, use fluxbox as your Gnome window manager (though its support for Gnome desktop APIs is only in its early stages), so saying that "Gnome was just a pig" doesn't say anything about fluxbox and its comparative performance.
Metacity, on the other hand (Gnome's default window manager) may or may not compare favorably to Fluxbox (I haven't tried a bare Metacity to compare against), but in using just a window manager, you lose all of the benefits of a desktop environment: session management, cross-application configuration parameters, uniform high-level drag and drop, etc.
You may not care about these things, but they are the core of a modern desktop environment, and have NOTHING to do with what window manager you select.
E16 CVS has 69000 lines, is 650k, and links 11 libraries, which puts it as the largest on two of the three categories; yet even with all the eyecandy turned on, it still runs as fast as things like blackbox on my 266 boxen -- large size doesn't *always* mean slow :)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
anti-aliased fonts! thats just bloat! we should learn to listen and type in binary (beep beep BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!)
seriously though i prefer blackbox to fluxbox and openbox (if i ever break kde or need my resources i use blackbox)