Slashdot Mirror
FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: Speed and Transparency
michuk writes "PolishLinux.org has published a review of FVWM-Crystal 3.0.4: "FVWM-Crystal is an eye-candy, functional and ultra-fast desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX, based on FVWM. Crystal can be used even on very old machines, thus it is a noticeable alternative to popular desktop choices like XFCE or Fluxbox.""
If it's eye-candy, one must ask:
Sure, it can be used on older machines, but what will the performance costs be? Is it going to be prohibitive to the actual functionality of the system (which, in UNIX, is what most users are using it for)?
The server is melting, here's the coral cache link.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
"FVWM-Crystal is an eye-candy, functional and ultra-fast desktop environment"
As opposed to their webserver...
Since the story comments that the developers dont remember what it stood for since its 'so old' . Geeeh. Old is not a few years..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It is in Debian testing and unstable....It appears to be about as quick/responsive as Icewm, but with (as promised) a lot better in the bling department.
Why do I need this?
Trying to get to the site... and not sure if we /.ed them or if they yanked the plug and ran away when they saw the story linking to them.
Looking forward to when the page is back up^^
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
Sometimes it doesn't hurt to link to the original site - or better, a pre-emptive Corel Cache of the original site !
Every time I have experimented with a lightweight fast desktop (fluxbox, icewm, xfce, etc.), I am initially impressed at how snappy the desktop itself feels, but once I launch a few applications, I am again disappointed at the overall slow feel of the apps themselves.
FVWM with Nautilus? When I use nautilus in another environment (window manager, whatever), it always starts slower than it does in Gnome (I know, I know, preload gnome-stuff and all that, but if you have to do that, what's the point?). Once nautilus is open, it still behaves sluggish and ackward. And it's not just nautilus. I have the same issue with konqueror, firefox, music apps, k3b, and more. A lightweight desktop is fast if I just want to login and look at your wallpaper, but once I try to get something done, I have the same old issues.
I can't quite describe the problem, but even after the tremendous improvements that have been made to the Linux desktop in the past few years, it still feels... slow. I'm not trying to troll here. I love Linux, and I wish it all the success in the world, but it just doesn't feel as snappy to me as windows 2000/XP. Seems like lost mouse-clicks and slow window redraws are a large part of the problem. Perhaps the problem lies with X, or with my own warped sense of perception... who knows?
Fvwm-Crystal is really nice, it shows how powerful and flexible Fvwm can be while still being light and fast. But its main drawback is that when something goes wrong, you are screwed unless you know Fvwm very well, and this is not something easy to achieve (for those who don't know Fvwm, just look at the man page.
Also, while we are on the subject of Fvwm, check out Metisse, a nice experimental Fvwm-based OpenGL desktop. I'm not sure if it's still actively maintened though. It would be a nice thing too if they ported it to Xgl.
So basically "eye candy" means "skins and transparency"? That'd be pretty awesome, in 1996.
Is there a grand chart comparing the most popular window managers (and lesser known ones like this) by feature?
--
make install -not war
thats not bad lookin' at all! i'm glad the developers of FVWM are still working on newer things.. its nice to be able to make use of older machines.. plus, ANYTHING is better than ol' FVWM95... you know what i'm talkin about...
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
It's not even a ****ing toolkit (which is also not a desktop) like the ****ing **** Gnome and KDE use, it's just a ****ing window manager. Sheesh.
I like the theme allot, I'm even downloading it now. The only downside I see is that I won't be able to put it on the Windows machine I have at work.
UGLY!
Am I the only one that thought the screen shots looked ugly? The wallpaper looks nice, but uhhh... that has nothing to do with the desktop. I think Gnome and KDE look way better than anything I seen in those screen shots. If I need a light weight desktop, I would use XFCE or fluxbox. However, all my systems are modern enough to handle Gnome so I really don't see any point in running a "light weight" desktop. Gnome 2.14 made nice speed improvements and now Gnome 2.16 is out with some more memory and speed improvements among other nice enhancements. To each his own, I guess.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
Last time I checked, FVWM was just a WM, and not a proper desktop as such.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
It's a fucking theme.
There seems to be one in-progress on Wikipedia:
p _environments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_deskto
Right now it only compares Gnome, KDE, and xfe, and then it really only lists somewhat superficial differences. If it were fleshed out, I think it could be quite handy.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
For those of us that just wanna play with a new toy for a day, it'd really be nice to see a live cd.
So, running it with just gaim, it swallows 115MB of my RAM. OTOH GNOME 2.16, running gaim, some applets (deskbar, weather applet), gnome-volume-manager (and so one...), swallows 180MB of RAM. For crapy 65MB of RAM, I don't see a point in fvwm-crystal. I know, gaim takes half of gnome with it, but in the end, I need gaim.
Even when I use GNOME, I allways have at least 250MB of RAM for cache.
Don't take me wrong, fvwm is great, as fvwm-crystal is. But, I'll pass it. I do have machine that is capable of running more sophisticated desktop interfaces, but I always admire people who are able to get last Hz or kb of RAM from their machine.
If *nobody* knew back then, why was it proudly displayed as such on the old websites? Was everyone just too stupid to read? Or perhaps they were all blind?
And if no one knew back then, why do i remember it today? 10 years is not that long ago. If one cant remember that far back, there is a problem.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
..anything in this new one that'll compell me to upgrade?
I've been running the same binary since about 1997, so far, I really haven't found anything it doesn't do. But it IS a little ugly.
I didn't upgrade to FVWM-2 because its configuration files weren't compatible... How are they for 3?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Of the comments I've read, I see a few trends:
-Why do we need this? We have KDE/GNOME/CDE/lots of M$ look-a-likes already!
-Why use a fast WM if my apps slow down?
-It's really not that pretty. Compiz+XGL looks better.
Honestly, I think most of you simply missed the point. I've been using Crystal on my workstation for two years, and it's not a slow machine by anyone's standard. After about a year with KDE and another with GNOME, I realized that I just don't like the generic "windozey" look that most environments have. I've never liked the idea of a taskbar the way it's implemented, for example. I can remember having 8 windows of the same application open on a 1024x768 screen, and in the taskbar, I could never tell which was which because the names didn't fit in the buttons anymore.
FVWM (and Crystal by proxy) has allowed me to taylor my environment to exactly the way I use my machine, and because there's nothing particularly heavy about it in terms of system requirements, I can take my config with me to any other machine with FVWM. On my desktop and laptop, I start gnome-session in order to preload the libraries needed for gaim, firefox, gimp, et al., but I never had a problem with GNOME itself, only its assumptions about how I want to use my machine. Therefore, on a recent machine where using something lightweight isn't a strict necessity, Crystal is just as fast as GNOME.
To address the third point: XGL+Compiz are much prettier, yes, but they also require much more in terms of power just to draw your desktop. I'm not much a fan of "expensive" eye candy. Compositing is nice, and can definitely help productivity and even speed up the desktop's apparent latency, but wobbly windows? Eye candy is nice, but I prefer functionality if I have to choose. Crystal, by default, opens a terminal when I right-click the desktop, and I know exactly where to look in the config to change that. It simply can't be done with compiz, metacity, or kwin. As for real transparency, xcompmgr is good enough to run in the background for compositing, so I've solved that problem for my terminals, anyway.
It's really just about flexibility. FVWM-Crystal allows me to use my machines the way I want to and fix little problems that irk me about the environment, while at the same time being quite visually impressive compared to a stock GNOME/KDE/M$ setup.
Legalize it.
Back then, you had RAM running at the same speed as your CPU. You could access RAM faster than you could multiply. Nobody needed to optimize for cache locality because there wasn't any cache -- no point when RAM is as fast as the CPU.
Back then, you didn't have very much RAM to deal with and (see above) dealing with it was cheap. Screen resolutions were small. If you had 32 kB of video RAM you were happy! CGA didn't even have that much.
Back then, expectations were lower too.
Now, you want to run this on modern hardware. That's cool, as long as you're happy with a 540x400 black-and-white (no grey) display. I bet X really flies doing that. But no, you want 2560x1600 with 32 bits per pixel and you actually want to play a video or at least not watch your windows repaint.
Well. That's a different kettle of fish entirely.
First you need to kill off nautilus. Lord only knows why anybody
/apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop -s false /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop -s false
would want icons buried underneath all their apps. (or wallpaper
for that matter -- do you run apps or do you just stare at the
desktop and wank?)
Depending on your system, one of these commands should kill nautilus:
gconftool -t bool
gconftool2 -t bool
Next, ban all k* and q* apps. You can use the ldd command to
see if an app is using the Qt libraries. Ideally you'd uninstall
the Qt libraries.
Ditch any silly junk sitting in the the taskbar.
Ditch gnome-terminal. Yes, GNOME can use xterm. Plain "xterm".
Opera won't fit in your light and fast category?
Try the new austrumi 50 meg live CD. It uses E-17 as the window manager. Good way to try it out easily. To get to english, look in the menu for the union jack flag, mash that, it will reboot x into english (more or less)
Transparency is for what exactly? Why would I want things being hard to read?
Skins: a poor substitute for sane defaults and being able to adjust the important things.
Many years ago, Windows 3.1 got this right. You could adjust the thickness of a window border. Today this ability is absent from the Linux desktops. You have to switch themes. Of course, at best only a few nasty-looking themes will have the thickness you want. If you want 10-pixel borders (near-blind with a 30" 2560x1600 display) you're just out of luck.
The same concept applies to KDE and it's KIO slaves. It gives applications an api to read/write to many file system types, including inside a zip file, and across ssh (fish://) !
No applications need special programming for any one of these, just for kio as a whole. This means that not only do you not need to change your program between supported platforms, but you don't need to do anything special if someone developes a new kio slave (I assume the same basic concept holds for gnome as well).
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
It is nice, but so old school with start menus and all. It is hard to find the right application when you have like 30 applications if you have traditional start menu. There is a next generation WM that solves these problems. It's called Kuartet.
Kuartet is a KDE app using Superkaramba to make a KDE environment look like an improved Mezzo desktop.
Every screenshot on that page is pretty damn ugly..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
WNT is to VMS what HAL is to IBM. QED.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
It's an interesting coincidence of names, but it doesn't hold up. NT ran on an emulator called N-10, referred to as NT. Microsoft wasn't as savvy at message control then, and talked to the press about a project called "NT". Marketing backronymed it to "New Technology".
Cutler wasn't brought in until NT was in full swing and already named.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeh!!
Actually, HAL -> IBM corresponds to VMS -> WNT. The latter makes more sense in a way, since WNT came after VMS.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I can not get linux pass the "swirl test" on a 1.6ghz box with 512mb RAM, and a 128mb video ram. I know, that's not exactly high end, but windows passed with much lower system resources.
By "swirl test" I mean: open a browser to full screen, open another window on top of the browser, quickly swirl the window opened on top of the browser. If I get tracing etc, it fails the test.
NT4.0 easily passes the swirl test. Even on a 120mhz box with a 4mb video card.
Well, I was in progress of checking if i have all the prerequisits, when i noticed i need "Trayer". No problem. But after typing "./configure" guess what... "-bash: ./configure: No such file or directory" a quick ls -la confirmed this.
I hope Crystal can function without trayer.
there is no issue with my network
Where can I download those background images?
**u** ** **y* ***o*, ** *** *t*** *!
FWWM-Crystal + Ubuntu = "FUBUNTU" ? And I thought Ubuntu sounded enough like stuffing things "up yours" as it is...
I think my favorite lightweight + good features browser has to be iCab, at least back when I used to use it on mac classic OS. Unfortunately, not open source at all, not even close, and mac only. Pity. I agree with you on not many good alternative browsers out there. I currently use seamonkey, I find it better than FF, but still would like something faster, but I put up with it because it seems, to my eyes anyway, to render pages the best, which is the real bottom line on browsing. I like konq as well but it just doesn't make the pages look as nice as seamonkey.
Must be why WNT keeps locking the user outside of the airlocks.
- These characters were randomly selected.
I always thought polish linux was windows.
I thought Corel ate Wordperfect then failed in the non-free Linux distribution game. It's about time they stepped their game up into caching slashdottable sites.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
For me personally out of all the window managers i've used, I prefer Window Maker - beats all else.
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
I'm willing to wager that you don't have a girlfriend.