fluxbox & xfce for a linux noob

[Tostada]

I used to have to use UNIX a lot, and a few years ago I messed around with Mandrake/Debian/SUSE a little, but I never really got into the whole Linux thing. I just never liked the feel of Gnome or KDE.

Now I've been looking around and fluxbox & xfce both look like window managers I'd like to play around with. Are there any noob-friendly distros that would be easy to get going with them? Ubuntu is supposed to be really good and easy, but how hard would it be to get something better looking than Gnome on it?

I really don't have much of a clue about how this stuff works. I'm certainly not keen on spending the afternoon cutting/pasting things into a terminal window to get it working. Mandrake was just about my speed -- not a lot of monkeying around. I just didn't like the interface.

I thought apps were complied for your specific window manager. I know there's stuff for Gnome that isn't available for KDE and vice versa. So how's that work? Firefox, for example, only has one Linux download available. Does that work on every window manager? How do they do that? What about Thunderbird and Open Office?

I'm looking for something that can run basic mail/web/office apps, and I'd like to be able to use the same distro on my PC as I run on a few old machines (down to about a P2-300), possibly a laptop, and I need my Orinoco Wi-Fi card to work.

 

[M00T]

You can run any app within any environment as long as you have the required libraries. A good package management system such as APT or portage will take care of these things.

 

[Tostada]

So why do you see things like instant message clients specifically for Gnome or CD burning apps specifically for KDE?

 

[drag]

Yes. Learn howto use apt-get.. It's very revolutionary for the unix world in terms of aviable software.

Debian is very nice, especially if you have good handle of unix shells. They created some nice tools and conventions that work very nicely without having to deal with GUI stuff.

Ubuntu is based on Debian andis much the same way.

So say you want to run fluxbox. After installing everything just go:
apt-get install fluxbox
and then when it's finished installing, log out and in the kdm, gdm or xdm graphical login screen select 'fluxbox' as the default for your user.

that should be it. if you don't like the graphical login stuff, then disable it from your init scripts (chmod -x is simpliest, but there are tools for managing the init scripts) and use a .xinitrc file to tell it what window mananger you want.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Tostada
So why do you see things like instant message clients specifically for Gnome or CD burning apps specifically for KDE?

Not sure what your aiming at. But many of those apps are specificly designed to tightly integrate into the Desktop Enviroment (as opposed to a Window manager).

You can find many that aren't realy either for kde or gnome. It's up to you to find out what works best for you.

Also be sure to check out kde or gnome anyways. It's nice to have them installed (even if you don't use them) and they are much less annoying then they used to be.

 

[Tostada]

Thanks for the info.

So you're saying it doesn't matter what distro I get, I can just fire up a terminal and "apt-get install fluxbox" or "apt-get install xfce" to try them out?

Any suggestions on a distro? I'm mostly looking for hardware compatability and ease of installation. I don't want a crippled OS, but I don't need a 9 GB install with a billion things I'll never touch.

Gentoo sounds like it might be a little too weird for me, but I'm intrigued by the apparent simplicity of Portage (even though the Gentoo site's page on installing Fluxbox looked pretty complicated). It doesn't look like Mandrake has had much progress lately. Ubuntu sounds really solid, especially being based on Debian which a lot of the real Linux geeks seem to like.

 

[drag]

Most any Debian-based distros (mostly I mean debian and ubuntu) will do that. Other distros have different tools.

With Ubuntu and Debian once you get the package manager setup with all the extra repositories (ftp and web sites realy) that they support then you have about 16,000 packages to choose from.

Other distros have their own methods.

Fedora uses Yum and optionally (a ported) apt-get. Suse has yast and mandrake urpmi.

Out of those only Debian and Ubuntu are worth realy getting into and have the highest quality as well as highest quantity of aviable packages. Next is fedora with it's yum setup which can be nice if you add third party repositories such as 'Dag's rpms' (be sure to read the faq on his page if you go with fedora).

So each distro is different.'

Gentoo may have more packages aviable then Debian.. but I don't think so. It's portage system is very flexible, though. The downside is that Q&A isn't as high and you have to compile everything yourself..

If you want to give a modern linux a try Ubuntu is a good place to start. Personally I am a die-hard Debian user.

usually people try quite a few until they find one that suites them the best.

 

[kamper]

You'll only be using apt-get on a Debian based distro. You can get versions for rpm distros (fedora, mandrake/mandriva, suse) though, but I think it's mostly for extra packages

As for the cross-wm compatibility, in theory any program will run on any window manager. The majority of the gui is implemented by some widget toolkit that can run under any wm (kde and gnome have their own toolkits but they don't depend on kde or gnome running specifically). The part the wm handles is the borders and the bar at the top, as well as things like toolbars and desktops which doesn't affect the functionality of most programs. The place where you'd run into trouble is if something is when an app depends on some infrastructure like kde pim which shares data between the different processes or if you have something like kde managing your smb networking.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I prefer blackbox over its children, but XFCE isn't too bad. It's the only Desktop Emulator I've enjoyed recentlyish.

 

[M00T]

Ubuntu is great for a typical user. Gentoo is amazing and very educational, but there's just so much involved in adminstration that it might scare off a new user.

 

[Nothinman]

So why do you see things like instant message clients specifically for Gnome or CD burning apps specifically for KDE?

Generally they only say that because they use one of the two's base libraries, GTK or QT. KDE apps tend to bring with them a lot of cruft though, just starting one up will get you at least a half dozen ksomething daemons. Gnome/GTK apps are generally lighter in that respect, but I guess the actual cost of those daemons is pretty low.

So you're saying it doesn't matter what distro I get, I can just fire up a terminal and "apt-get install fluxbox" or "apt-get install xfce" to try them out?

Pretty much, the packages should also add a menu to GDM so you'll just logout and they should appear in the session menu.

Gentoo may have more packages aviable then Debian.. but I don't think so.

Not according to their webpage. Packages.gentoo.org says there's 9,614 ebuilds available and Debian unstable (+ marillat for mplayer) has over 17,000.

 

[Tostada]

Well, I just couldn't get the XFce GUI installer going, even after installing all the libraries it wanted it would just fail.

It also took me about an hour to find out that I had to add a server in Synaptic before my "sudo apt-get install xfce4" would work.

But now it's working fine.

I guess Gnome is a lot nicer than last time I played around with Linux. Not sure if I'll stick with xfce or not.

 

[Nothinman]

It also took me about an hour to find out that I had to add a server in Synaptic before my "sudo apt-get install xfce4" would work.

Did you read the docs at ubuntuguide.org?

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

It also took me about an hour to find out that I had to add a server in Synaptic before my "sudo apt-get install xfce4" would work.

Did you read the docs at ubuntuguide.org?

LOL!

Just the table of contents is 12 pages long. You expect me to read that before I start installing?

Besides, it didn't seem like a very useful site. It's pretty much nothing but "how do I install..." and none of the items listed were xfce.

I suppose it would've helped if I had read the "Repositories: How to add extra repositories?" section, but at the time I didn't even know what a repository was. Besides, I'm a little too much of a Linux noob to be cutting/pasting tons of crap into config files, and obviously the overly-complex instructions on ubuntuguide.org aren't necessary. All I actually needed to do was fire up Synaptic and add the "Universe" repository in the settings menu.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Tostada

Originally posted by: Nothinman

It also took me about an hour to find out that I had to add a server in Synaptic before my "sudo apt-get install xfce4" would work.

Did you read the docs at ubuntuguide.org?

LOL!

Just the table of contents is 12 pages long. You expect me to read that before I start installing?

Besides, it didn't seem like a very useful site. It's pretty much nothing but "how do I install..." and none of the items listed were xfce.

I suppose it would've helped if I had read the "Repositories: How to add extra repositories?" section, but at the time I didn't even know what a repository was. Besides, I'm a little too much of a Linux noob to be cutting/pasting tons of crap into config files, and obviously the overly-complex instructions on ubuntuguide.org aren't necessary. All I actually needed to do was fire up Synaptic and add the "Universe" repository in the settings menu.

Quoting from the Ubuntu guide:

Q: How to install Newsreader (Pan)?

1. Read General Notes
2. Read How to add extra repositories?
3.

sudo apt-get install pan

4. Read How to refresh GNOME panel?
5. Applications -> Internet -> Pan Newsreader

I think that adequately explains how to install an application. Given that information you should be able to use the noodle to figure out xfce. It even mentions repositories right there. :Q

Yes, read the FAQ before asking questions.

 

[Nothinman]

Just the table of contents is 12 pages long. You expect me to read that before I start installing?

Not all of it, but most web browsers have a search function. I don't run Ubuntu but I've used the docs on that site for people a bit, it's usually not hard to find what they're trying to do on there.

obviously the overly-complex instructions on ubuntuguide.org aren't necessary. All I actually needed to do was fire up Synaptic and add the "Universe" repository in the settings menu.

Adding those repositories just adds like 2 words to sources.list, neither method is too overly complex if you ask me.