





Bluetiles features:

Bluetile is a tiling window manager for X based on xmonad . Bluetile automatically arranges the windows to tile the screen, maximizing screen use. I really like Bluetile because you don't have to login to a different session: all you have to do is normally login into your Gnome session and start Bluetile.

Hybrid approach: Stacking window layout & tiling layouts available

Maximizing & minimizing windows in all layouts

All features accessible from mouse, as well as keyboard

Good multihead support

Designed to integrate with the GNOME desktop environment

Bluetiles is not very easy to install but that's basically because there is no how-to (or a decent one anyway) for this so I decided to provide a post with full installation instructions - for Ubuntu (I've only tested it in Ubuntu Karmic).



Before we get started, take a look at these screenshots I've just took with Bluetiles :



video

1. Firstly, let's install everything we need and is available in the repositories.



Open a terminal and paste this:

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall libghc6-network-dev libghc6-parsec-dev libghc6-mtl-dev libghc6-zlib-dev libghc6-glade-dev libghc6-gtk-dev ghc



2. Download and install Gtk2Hs



Download Gtk2Hs from

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gtk2hs/gtk2hs-0.10.1.tar.gz

Then extract the archive and open a terminal, navigate to the folder where you extracted and run the following commands:

./configure make sudo checkinstall --fstrans=no --install=yes --pkgname=gtk2hs --pkgversion "0:10.1-12ubuntu3" --default

The last command from above will create a .deb file and install it, so you can easily remove / upgrade Gtk2Hs later on.



3. Download and install Haskell Cabal-Install in Ubuntu



You can download it from

wget http://haskell.org/cabal/release/cabal-install-0.6.2/cabal-install-0.6.2.tar.gz

Then extract it, navigate to the folder where you extracted and run these commands:

./bootstrap.sh

sudo ln -s $HOME/.cabal/bin/cabal /usr/local/bin/cabal



4. Installing Bluetile



Run the following commands in a terminal:

cabal update cabal install bluetile



Now you may want to close any Avant Window Navigator, Docky or Cairo Dock instances you may have running and finally run Bluetile:

~/.cabal/bin/bluetile



5. Using Bluetile.



Take a look at the keyboard shortcuts available







Update: you can now install Bluetile in Ubuntu 10.04 from a PPA repository



Credits for the image in the beginning of the post: Dons00 Open a terminal and paste this:Download Gtk2Hs from HERE . Or, you can use this command instead for downloading the file:Then extract the archive and open a terminal, navigate to the folder where you extracted and run the following commands:The last command from above will create a .deb file and install it, so you can easily remove / upgrade Gtk2Hs later on.You can download it from HERE or just run this command:Then extract it, navigate to the folder where you extracted and run these commands:Run the following commands in a terminal:Now you may want to close any Avant Window Navigator, Docky or Cairo Dock instances you may have running and finally run Bluetile:Take a look at the keyboard shortcuts available HERE

And aprovided by the Bluetile website: