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What's so great about Fluxbox? IceWM is lighter Results 1 to 15 of 82 Thread: What's so great about Fluxbox? IceWM is lighter Tweet #1 Join Date Oct 2002 Location Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA Posts 799 What's so great about Fluxbox? IceWM is lighter I've been playing with Debian 4.0 on an old Toshiba Libretto 70CT with 32megs of RAM. As such, RAM is very tight!



I've long been a fan of IceWM, as one of the most functional lightweight window managers. But testing things out...it seems that IceWM is also the lightest/fastest.



Here is the RAM usage according to "free -k". For testing, I opened one aterm window and ran "free -k". The RAM usage was:

Code: console 6,472k (before startx, no aterm) icewm-lite 12,708k icewm 13,144k jwm 13,552k icewm+bg 14,188k (icewm plus icewmbg) fluxbox 15,100k



I used IceCrack2 as the IceWM theme (maybe not the lightest, but my favorite theme). For Fluxbox, I used the "Minimal" style. Other Fluxbox styles consumed even more RAM.



I was surprised that jwm also consumes more RAM than IceWM, and jwm has some annoying functionality limitations.



So what's so great about fluxbox? I notice fluxbox seems a bit sluggish compared to IceWM even on my fast computers. IceWM doesn't have tabbed windows, but frankly I don't find tabbed windows all that useful when I have workspaces. Isaac Kuo, ICQ 29055726 or Yahoo mechdan #2 Join Date Oct 2002 Location Binghamton NY Posts 2,435 You're just trying to get a rise out of me aren't you? You're just hoping I'll take the bait.



I'm going to take the bait.



I know I tried Ice WM once, but I can't remember much about it. So I'm not going to say categorically that Fluxbox is better. Maybe it's not the greatest, but since you asked, what's so great about fluxbox isn't lightness. It's text. Everything about Fluxbox is configured by text files. They are light, portable, easy to manage. You easily port the test files from computer to computer, from install to install, from distro to distro. Do this:



cp -r .fluxbox ~



And everything you had set up on your old computer is now set up on your new computer. You've got the same menu, the same themes, keyboard shortcuts, provided by you for you. There's no menu more intuitive than the one you design yourself.



Text means you can use search and replace to speed up changes. If you want to switch applications. (Firefox started to crash on me, I wanted to switch to sea monkey. I changed every instance of firefox in the menu and the keys to seamonkey, all at once. My favorite theme is "kickbox transparent" which i created by taking someone else's menu and switching all the colors around. It took maybe three minutes, and I'm not kidding. kiaragnulinux.blogspot.com

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My Twitter Avatar #3 Join Date Feb 2000 Location Houston, Tx. Posts 770 Marko should get a lot of credit for icewm, 9 years and icewm has never been without a developer/maintainer and it's been useful when I started using it in 2000.



free isn't the best way to measure memory usage though. Try checking the process table. I forget how X / window managers work together, is the WM a child process of the x server. I'd guess you need to sum the x server, x client, the WM and any child process of the WM #4 Join Date Feb 2000 Location Houston, Tx. Posts 770 Originally Posted by blackbelt_jones Originally Posted by Maybe it's not the greatest, but since you asked, what's so great about fluxbox isn't lightness. It's text. Everything about Fluxbox is configured by text files. They are light, portable, easy to manage. You easily port the test files from computer to computer, from install to install, from distro to distro. Do this: #5 Join Date Jan 2004 Location Toronto, Canada Posts 763 heh, as soon as I saw this title I thought to my self "uh oh, this is going to get blackbelt foaming at the mouth" Check out the Unix/Linux Administration Program at Seneca College.

Thanx to everyone that helped/helps me on this forum!



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#6 Join Date Oct 2002 Location Binghamton NY Posts 2,435 Originally Posted by Calipso Originally Posted by heh, as soon as I saw this title I thought to my self "uh oh, this is going to get blackbelt foaming at the mouth"



As I said at the beginning, I may be Frantic for Flubox, but that doesn't preclude that there could be something better. Only someone who has throroughly tested every Window Manager can make that call, and in these matters I am just a big fat fifty year-old caffeine addicted baby.



Originally Posted by stiles Originally Posted by That's very basic Unix philosophy stuff, :cough: store data is flat text files :cough: it's also not unique to fluxbox



I have to get ready for church. I'll edit the above stream of semi-consciousness later. Last edited by blackbelt_jones; 05-25-2008 at 09:52 AM . kiaragnulinux.blogspot.com

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My Twitter Avatar #7 Join Date Oct 2002 Location Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA Posts 799 Originally Posted by stiles Originally Posted by free isn't the best way to measure memory usage though. Try checking the process table. I forget how X / window managers work together, is the WM a child process of the x server. I'd guess you need to sum the x server, x client, the WM and any child process of the WM



So I used a test which I sort of had some confidence about reading. Isaac Kuo, ICQ 29055726 or Yahoo mechdan #8 Join Date Oct 2002 Location Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA Posts 799 Originally Posted by blackbelt_jones Originally Posted by What's special is the level of transparency. Text isn't just storage, it's the interface for configuring. That may not be unique, but it's great.



Unfortunately, there's a new trend of using non-helpful barely commented xml instead of traditional commented text files. This is exemplified by GNOME and jwm. The xml configuration files barely has any comments at all, so you have to read outside documentation just to get anything done.



Frankly, even if jwm were lighter than IceWM, I probably wouldn't use it just because its xml configuration file offends my sensibilities. Isaac Kuo, ICQ 29055726 or Yahoo mechdan #9 Join Date Oct 2002 Location Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA Posts 799 BTW, there are some GUI tools for editing IceWM preferences/menus, but I never use them; I never even install them. I prefer simply editing the text config files directly. The GUI tools just get in the way. Isaac Kuo, ICQ 29055726 or Yahoo mechdan #10 Join Date Oct 2002 Location Binghamton NY Posts 2,435 This is like the man who loves his wife so much that he comes up to guys on the street and says "Your wife isn't so great! What's so great about your wife?"



Maybe your wife has a nice slender figure. That's very nice, but maybe my wife likes to make love in every position imaginable. Still you've got me thinking about maybe having a brief fling with your wife. kiaragnulinux.blogspot.com

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My Twitter Avatar #11 Join Date Feb 2000 Location Houston, Tx. Posts 770 Originally Posted by IsaacKuo Originally Posted by That's the thing--I looked at "ps -aux" and thought...heck, I don't know all of which processes I need to sum up. (I always forget about the forest option it's unique to the gnu ps) #12 Join Date Feb 2000 Location Houston, Tx. Posts 770 Originally Posted by blackbelt_jones Originally Posted by What's special is the level of transparency. Text isn't just storage, it's the interface for configuring. That may not be unique, but it's great. Tell me about something else that uses text for the interface, and I won't feel like you scored points over me. I'll feel greatful for information that I'd like to have. Fluxbox devotees are fond of posting their text files in their blogs. The medium of text fits wonderfully with Fluxbox's simple, natural "table of contents" structure.



From a developer's perspective config files is storage of configuration data for their program. Yes it's great and it's been the norm in the Unix world from the get go, yep all the way back to the 70's. It would be far easier to list the Unix programs that do not use ascii text files for configuration than list the ones that do. Just browse though /etc and tell me how many non-text config files you find. #13 Join Date Oct 2002 Location Binghamton NY Posts 2,435 Just some free advice, quit thinking everything is a competition, I have no intention of scoring points over you or whatever, I was just pointing out something that was obvious to me.



What?



Doesn't the very passage that you quote make it explicit that I don't consider it a competition? Indeed, I tried to make the point more than once, because of the title of the thread, (which I'm sure IssacKuo never meant to be taken very seriously) Did you think I protested too much?



From a developer's perspective config files is storage of configuration data for their program. Yes it's great and it's been the norm in the Unix world from the get go, yep all the way back to the 70's. It would be far easier to list the Unix programs that do not use ascii text files for configuration than list the ones that do. Just browse though /etc and tell me how many non-text config files you find. From a developer's perspective config files is storage of configuration data for their program. Yes it's great and it's been the norm in the Unix world from the get go, yep all the way back to the 70's. It would be far easier to list the Unix programs that do not use ascii text files for configuration than list the ones that do. Just browse though /etc and tell me how many non-text config files you find. interacts with the data (from kde, gnome, and xfce, anyway) Where and how the data is stored is a completely different issue. Last edited by blackbelt_jones; 05-26-2008 at 03:23 AM . kiaragnulinux.blogspot.com

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My Twitter Avatar #14 Join Date Apr 2001 Location SF Bay Area, CA Posts 14,947 Originally Posted by stiles Originally Posted by free isn't the best way to measure memory usage though.



Try checking the process table. Try checking the process table. free only counts that memory once. Which is correct -- it's only taking up one set of pages in physical RAM; those pages are simply mapped into both process's virtual address space.



Plus, when you check the process table, you'll see X using bunches of memory that it isn't really using, because it's just mapped video memory off the graphics card (though this may depend on your video driver). It still shows up as "used", because it's taking up virtual address space in the X server (and physical address ranges off the CPU), but it isn't backed by physical RAM, so it shouldn't be counted. free also skips this non-physical-RAM virtual address space, since it only cares about physical RAM usage.



is the WM a child process of the x server. is the WM a child process of the x server. startx. (I think something similar happens when you use a display manager, but I don't know the details.) But it doesn't matter which is a child of which if you just count all physical RAM that's in use.



I'd guess you need to sum the x server, x client, the WM and any child process of the WM I'd guess you need to sum the x server, x client, the WM and any child process of the WM



Even if the connection is over localhost (DISPLAY=localhost:0.0), or a Unix-domain socket at /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 (DISPLAY=:0.0), you're still copying data around between physical memory pages. This is much faster than sending it over the network -- but if you share the pages directly, no copying is required at all, which is even faster.



Originally Posted by blackbelt_jones Originally Posted by Tell me about something else that uses text for the interface #15 Join Date Feb 2000 Location Houston, Tx. Posts 770 Originally Posted by bwkaz Originally Posted by Why not?



OK this begs the question how would you figure out the memory footprint of a WM? Posting Permissions You may not post new threads

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