Hello everyone. After trying to uninstall everything to do with KDE, Gnome, and et cetera on my server, I seriously broke my whole system and had to reinstall. But this time I installed without any desktop environment whatsoever, and managed to squeeze the installation size down to around 300mb, and put that on a 400mb disk. Perhaps it's stretching it slightly, but it works!
My question is, what are all the essentials I need to set up a very small desktop environment on the server? I'm thinking maybe X and Fluxbox, but are those the smallest? And how do I get it up and running? I tried installing XDM and Fluxbox once (before I broke everything), and only got a grey screen with a cursor when I tried to start it.
Is there a way to start Fluxbox without having a display manager at all? And will this prevent me from using vncserver on my server?
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Smallest Desktop
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Penguin Skinner
- Posts: 709
- Joined: 2005-09-15 20:37
- Location: North by Northwest
If you're going to be using different window managers, you may find it easier to avoid using a display manager at all.
Really just scratching the surface here ... To run fluxbox without a display manager, you can simply create/edit ~/.xsession (or ~/.xinitrc) to read as follows:
Once logged in to the shell, issue the command 'startx' to start fluxbox (fluxbox also has a startup script, 'startfluxbox', but I've never found it useful or necessary.) You may need to add certain arguments to startx to get things to display to your liking - e.g. 'startx -- -dpi 100'. As folks are fond of saying, you'll probably want to read the man and info pages. 
BTW ... for security reasons, you really should run using 'exec startx' rather than just 'startx' if you're not using a window manager. That way, someone hitting ctrl-alt-backspace won't still be logged in under your user account after killing X.
If you haven't worked with fluxbox, it has it's annoyances. The documentation isn't particularly good or current, and it can be aggravating to configure. There seem to be a few bugs with the configuration program and taskbar menu, and sometimes it corrupts the ~/.fluxbox/init file. Dock apps for fluxbox's 'slit' are an iffy bunch, at best.
Worst of all, though, IMHO, is the fact that it's difficult to finds apps, other than those that are part of KDE or Gnome, that give you the kind of functionality and ease of use that modern users have mostly come to appreciate and expect. Even something as simple as a terminal ... after using konsole or gnome-terminal, I feel very limited using something like xterm, aterm, wterm, etc. Same thing with editors and file managers under X: you may really start to appreciate konqueror and kate/kwrite after you've tried to find replacement apps. And then the Catch-22 becomes, if you're running KDE apps under another window manager, performance can actually be worse than under KDE.
For all that, I have fluxbox installed, and actually use it some.
Re: vncserver ... I don't run it, but I don't think you'll have any problem running it under fluxbox or other window manager. If KDE or Gnome isn't listed as a dependency ...
Finally ... having used a number of different window managers and desktop environments, the only one I feel may be worth mentioning that you might not be familiar with is Windowlab. Windowlab is truly minimalistic and yet highly functional with virtually no configuration necessary, other than making up a very simply text file menu. Windowlab is kind of funky, and people tend to either like it or hate it, but I think it looks really clean, and it doesn't seem to have any real 'gotchas'. With the Windowlab package requiring only 147KB of diskspace, and not requiring a bunch of extra packages for functionality you'll almost certainly need or want, Windowlab is the 'smallest desktop' I know of that's really usable.
Really just scratching the surface here ... To run fluxbox without a display manager, you can simply create/edit ~/.xsession (or ~/.xinitrc) to read as follows:
Code: Select all
exec fluxboxBTW ... for security reasons, you really should run using 'exec startx' rather than just 'startx' if you're not using a window manager. That way, someone hitting ctrl-alt-backspace won't still be logged in under your user account after killing X.
If you haven't worked with fluxbox, it has it's annoyances. The documentation isn't particularly good or current, and it can be aggravating to configure. There seem to be a few bugs with the configuration program and taskbar menu, and sometimes it corrupts the ~/.fluxbox/init file. Dock apps for fluxbox's 'slit' are an iffy bunch, at best.
Worst of all, though, IMHO, is the fact that it's difficult to finds apps, other than those that are part of KDE or Gnome, that give you the kind of functionality and ease of use that modern users have mostly come to appreciate and expect. Even something as simple as a terminal ... after using konsole or gnome-terminal, I feel very limited using something like xterm, aterm, wterm, etc. Same thing with editors and file managers under X: you may really start to appreciate konqueror and kate/kwrite after you've tried to find replacement apps. And then the Catch-22 becomes, if you're running KDE apps under another window manager, performance can actually be worse than under KDE.
For all that, I have fluxbox installed, and actually use it some.
Re: vncserver ... I don't run it, but I don't think you'll have any problem running it under fluxbox or other window manager. If KDE or Gnome isn't listed as a dependency ...
Finally ... having used a number of different window managers and desktop environments, the only one I feel may be worth mentioning that you might not be familiar with is Windowlab. Windowlab is truly minimalistic and yet highly functional with virtually no configuration necessary, other than making up a very simply text file menu. Windowlab is kind of funky, and people tend to either like it or hate it, but I think it looks really clean, and it doesn't seem to have any real 'gotchas'. With the Windowlab package requiring only 147KB of diskspace, and not requiring a bunch of extra packages for functionality you'll almost certainly need or want, Windowlab is the 'smallest desktop' I know of that's really usable.
Last edited by Penguin Skinner on 2005-11-21 16:37, edited 1 time in total.
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Jeroen
- Debian Developer, Site Admin
- Posts: 483
- Joined: 2004-04-06 18:19
- Location: Utrecht, NL
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No windows manager at all is really a pain, you then cannot resize and/or move your windows at all. If you want a minimalistic windowmanager, use fvwm or something (true, not terribly small), or if you like a clean desktop, use ion3 (I use ion3 myself). Before using ion, please do check http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/ first to see if it's something for you.
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Penguin Skinner
- Posts: 709
- Joined: 2005-09-15 20:37
- Location: North by Northwest
You might take a look at ROX:
http://rox.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/WhatIsRox
It's a fairly light setup, but wtill with a full desktop, instead of just being a window manager.
XPDE is also rather small, if you don't mind the WinXP look.
http://rox.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/WhatIsRox
It's a fairly light setup, but wtill with a full desktop, instead of just being a window manager.
XPDE is also rather small, if you don't mind the WinXP look.