To setup a new window manager simply install it through the synaptic interface or apt-get or whatever you like using. From your graphical login screen were you enter your username and password you can sellect a fluxbox 'session', those things should be added automaticly.
Otherwise if you like to use startx you put what programs and window managers and such you want to start up in a .xinitrc file in your home directory. There should be samples for these somewere on your system.
Keep in mind that when using Fluxbox your going to loose niceties like your gnome font configuration and themes.. to make sure you keep any of those settings you can run 'gnome-settings-daemon' in the background which will then deal with theme'ng stuff with GTK applications. (in fedora/redhat stuff this isn't in your $PATH) Not sure how to make sure that starts up automaticly in fluxbox though. Various gnome related tools are generally named something like gnome-font-properties or gnome-session-properties and such if you want to access them from a xterm.
Is metacity the replacement for Enlightenment?
Metacity and Enlightenment 0.16 are Window managers and are pretty much interchangable. Used to be you had KDE-compatable, and Gnome-compatable window managers along with some that weren't compatable with either. Now there are 'EWMH' standards so that theoreticly any EWMH-compatable window manager can replace another.
Metacity is a simple, heavyweight (simple things tend to be complex to hide the complexity from the users) Window manager that is now the 'official' window manager for the Gnome desktop. With it you get all the nice GUI dialogs and such for it.
Enlightenment 0.16 has been continiously been given updates and now newer versions are EWMH compliant. I don't think Fluxbox is EWMH compliant, at least with current 'stable' versions, but that doesn't matter if your getting rid of the Gnome desktop completely.
For Gnome I like to use Openbox, which is designed to be used in Gnome or KDE. It's lightweight and has configuration stuff that I like.
I'm not really a graphics guy, so I don't really understand why this should be the case. My laptop has 8 MB dedicated VRAM for the GPU. At 32-bits of color depth, a 1024x768 screen should take about 3 MB per framebuffer. So why would halving my color depth reduce memory consumption that much? Especially if the framebuffer is in VRAM, which is dedicated anyway, right? Or do graphics in Linux get rendered in user-mode buffers first?
I think that this has to do with how fonts and other things are actually rendered, especially in Gnome. Current X.org's capabilities as far as 2d hardware acceleration is best described as 'suck', or 'virtually non-existant' so on low-cpu machines you can have a considurable performance improvement.. (generally media playback applications have various 'driver' options so that you can get good performance with those)
Just try it if you want if it doesn't make a difference you can go back. I am not sure of the exact issues, but it does make a difference in other people's laptops and such that I've looked at.
'm a pretty technical guy, so if you point me to an article that explains why the reporting isn't accurate, I'd be happy to read about it. Despite the fact that I work on Windows, I actually know quite a bit about memory management on various OSes, but I haven't been paying attention to Linux for a few years.
Good. Just as long as you don't think Virtual Memory is a file on your harddrive.
😛
It has to do with how things like shared libraries and cache stuff is taken into account. Often you get large amounts of applications that share most of the memory with each other, but will show up as seperate items in your memory stuff. Also the terms and stats can be misleading.
There is currently a large effort underway to reduce the memory usage and do optimizations on Gnome.
This wiki outlines a lot of the issues and such related to it.
http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction
Lots of good links from there. (a couple)
http://bmaurer.blogspot.com/2006/03/memory-usage-with-smaps.html
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/white-papers/MemoryUsage/MemoryUsage.txt?rev=1.2
For a long time it's been the highest priority to get everything working, usable, and stable. Now it's maturing to the point were some people are realy paying attention towards optimizations and integration... Especially with the interest in using Linux distros in developing countries and 'embedded' devices.
Here is the Linux kernel memory management home page.
http://linux-mm.org/LinuxMMDocumentation
They gotten pretty out of date in the past, mostly going into 2.4 series kernel changes during it's lifetime, but now it looks like they are going to a wiki to keep things up to date faster. There may be some good stuff there.
As far as 'just gnome' goes I think that Gnome developers are starting to take advantage of OpenSolaris and Dtrace a bit to help out with profiling and optimization. Or at least Sun has been pimping dtrace and showing gnome people how to use it and examples of benifits to try to attract more developers to it's platform.
Or something like this.
With the next release of Ubuntu (6.04 Dapper Drake) should start to show off some of these 'enhancements'. The efforts of some gnome developers to optimize stuff started after the release of Gnome 2.14, which is the current desktop on Ubuntu 5.10. With Fedora 5 (just released with the Gnome 2.16 desktop) people claim to experiance better performance. So it should be interesting to reinstall Ubuntu from scratch when 6.04 is released and see if you notice a difference.
