Quoting Carlo Capocasa <capocasa(a)gmx.net>et>: How does this do for processing overhead? I have been using fluxbox on my "performance" machine because it is lightweight but there are some features that I would like to have that don't seem supported in that manager. I use gnome 2.10 on my other machine because there isin't much you can do to make a pentium 700mHz speedy enough to do a lot of realtime processing. Lets say your building a machine for live realtime processing performance using PD: what windomanager is lightweight enough to not draw too much CPU power away from the audio apps, yet has a "desktop" and a customizable menubar able to do menus inside of menus? fluxbox cant seem to display a "desktop" and iconbox only does icons and isin't really a menu system. The gnome screen: http://aproximation.org/transport-screen.jpg -thewade

Personally, I use e17;) Then again I probably got lucky with my most recent CVS pull of it and it has been really stable for me. Fluxbox is great for a nice lightweight WM. Gnome is good on a slightly beefier machine for a more general all around control. XFCE I never got to impressed with myself. And I stay as far away from KDE as I possibly can. Seablade

On Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 05:53:21PM -0500, Dave Phillips wrote: word -- paul \ / wisehart >/ <//////$> |\|\|\

pirrone wrote: Ah, features. Just what I don't want. ;)

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006, Joe Hartley wrote: You can have that, you know. Just install olwm. :-) -- + Brent A. Busby, UNIX Systems Admin + "It's like being + + James Franck / Enrico Fermi Institute + blindsided by a + + The University of Chicago + flying dwarf..." +

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 11:36:44 +0000 Martin Habets &lt;errandir_news(a)mph.eclipse.co.uk&gt; wrote: I've done that on at least one system, but eventually stopped for some reason or another. (It might have been that I found black/fluxbox and went that route.) Good times. -- ====================================================================== Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh(a)brainiac.com Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa

The Other wrote: The Windows key? =-O What you're talking about? I eradicated them from the keyboard when I switched to gnu/Linux. I thought I wouldn't need them anymore! :-D c. -- www.cesaremarilungo.com

Personally I am going to be setting up with Penguin/Windows key to handle all my WM needs. I find it more logical myself that way, and then I use my CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT binded to my program so I know that none of my window manager funcitons conflict with those programmed into the program I need to use(Such is the case with ALT and Ardour at the moment) Seablade

On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 05:31:33PM +0100, Cesare Marilungo wrote: I actually purchased a linux keyboard. I have a tux and a key that says linux on it! The Linux button opens up my fluxbox menu. Jeremiah

On Monday 20 February 2006 07:43, The Other was like: Not directly, but running out of CPU power and memory can slow you down badly and make some tasks impossible on low-powered machines. I have found that running Openbox means I can use PIIs & PIIIs for music more effectively. -- cheers, tim hall http://glastonburymusic.org.uk/tim

Dave Phillips &lt;dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com&gt; writes: Yeah, I know what you mean. evilwm is my desktop of choice on those can't-be-bothered-with-features days. ./MiS

Quoting Ismael Valladolid Torres &lt;ivalladt(a)punkass.com&gt;om>: I think what Lee is saying is that with realtime-lsm (and ingo's spin-locking?), jackd, your audio apps, and limits.conf all set up right all processes bow to your audio apps. So audio will still get the lowest latency possible independant of other threads running on your machine, including the window manager. The screen may not refresh as frequently or be as responsive, but you should incur no addidional XRUNS from using one window manager over another. Am I right? Its kind of a techincality though, because if your not getting any XRUNS at a low latency, yet WM and thusly your interaction with your machine isin't very responsive, then what is the advantage of no XRUNS? So there needs to be a balance, and that is where WM's with a small footprint fit in I guess. Because if it takes less resources to draw the screen, screen redraws are more likely to be called from the scheduler between audio app calls. Please correct me if I am wrong, but that is my understanding. -thewade

On Mon, 2006-02-20 at 08:24 -0800, thewade wrote: This is all well and good but you're only talking about CPU. Disk I/O is another story entirely. If your WM starts doing some I/O that you weren't aware of you may get an xrun because you couldn't access the disk in time. This is the reason that I kill syslogd before I record. Granted, generally speaking you'll do OK due to the priority of your process but disk I/O takes a certain amount of time and you can't interrupt it once it's gone to the disk. -- Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner The Fuzzy Dice http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html "As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously." Benjamin Franklin, on declining patents offered by the governor of Pennsylvania for his "Pennsylvania Fireplace", c. 1744

On Mon, 2006-02-20 at 15:46 -0500, Lee Revell wrote: Some window managers cause quite a lot of I/O. KDE and Gnome being the biggest offenders. Generally any change in the window manager is saved to disk somewhere. This isn't the case with Fluxbox, fvwm, Blackbox, etc. This was the point of the entire thread. I was pointing out that CPU is not the only bottleneck and that is why I use a light WM instead of KDE when recording. -- Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner The Fuzzy Dice http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html "As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously." Benjamin Franklin, on declining patents offered by the governor of Pennsylvania for his "Pennsylvania Fireplace", c. 1744

On Tuesday 21 February 2006 20:39, Lee Revell was like: Some people just don't like GNOME, deal with it. Not all decisions that people make in computing are based on the relative grace or brokenness of the implementation. There are considerations of style, ergonomics, hardware limitations, personal choice and pure emotive fluff. Both GNOME and KDE have improved immeasurably since the people who don't like them tried them last. ;) They both provide great environments. Some people enjoy the familiarity of a Windows/Mac-like environment. Some people specifically don't. I like the combination of Openbox + fbpanel + rox that I use because it gives me the best of GNOME and Fluxbox-like features and everything is configurable in a way that I find easy to understand. I also enjoy the challenge of making my personal working environment as un-Windows/Mac-like as possible and the challenge of turning recycled hardware into useful multimedia machines. As you say, running KDE or GNOME doesn't affect the audio, the problem comes when you can't get the GUI to respond to your clicks on the 'Stop' button because the system is already doing double time trying to avoid xruns in the audio stream. You already did a sub 500MHz CPU disclaimer on that one, so fair enough. I've spent a lot of time working out how to soup up old bangers. I don't like a lot of the GNOME configuration utilities with their limited choices and I can't abide nautilus. Fairly major reasons for not using GNOME. I really, really have _tried_ to like it too. Fluxbox and Openbox have become popular with musicians for good reason, they stay out of the way, but can still be easily made to look good if need be. One day I will understand why people like fvwm too. ;] I rather enjoy these roundabout discussions on the merits and demerits of this and that software, it really is great to have such incredible choice. I usually point most Linux newbies at GNOME, despite my reservations, my son loves it and that's good enough recommendation for me. Personally I have just figured out devilspie and xmodmap, so my desktop experience is now near perfect and my multimedia keys now pop up the appropriate applications on the same desktop each time, no matter where I call them from. Neat. Right next I have to figure out LASH and I can start my entire studio from a single key! It was all a question of putting the right commands into a couple of text files, now that's what I call user-friendly! -- cheers, tim hall http://glastonburymusic.org.uk/tim

On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 12:13 +1100, Loki Davison wrote: I think they are both pretty well unbloated these days... Lee

On Sun, 2006-02-19 at 14:03 -0800, thewade wrote: The "processing overhead" of one desktop environment vs. another is negligible on a modern system. On a correctly set up system with properly written RT apps the desktop won't be able to interfere with the RT stuff anyway. Lee

On Sun, 2006-02-19 at 22:52 +0000, cdr wrote: This is why I qualified my response with "on a modern system"

I see 'properly written' and 'should'... well in real life problems do happen. I you run into problems, run the latencytest from ALSA to figure out where the problem is on your system. On my recording system the kernel DRM driver was causing terrible latency, but an ugly kernel patch put an end to that. I guess if I was a graphics programmer I would think GUI stuff has the highest priority. The short story: if you want to solve the problem you have to dig for the root cause. Martin On Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 06:00:36PM -0500, Lee Revell wrote:

Lee Revell wrote: Geez Lee, now what am I going to do with this nice spoiler now that you've ruined all the fun for me.

Personally I prefer the Maxwell House Coffee can tail pipes. Makes 'em sound like a sick chain saw ;-) -- Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner The Fuzzy Dice http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html "As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously." Benjamin Franklin, on declining patents offered by the governor of Pennsylvania for his "Pennsylvania Fireplace", c. 1744

On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 03:26 +0000, Martin Habets wrote: No! MORE COFFEEE!!!!!111!!!!1! Lee

On Sun, 2006-02-19 at 17:12 -0500, Lee Revell wrote: This may be true as far as CPU use is concerned but how about I/O? If your desktop or background processes start doing I/O and you need the disk I believe that may cause you some problems. I/O requests will swap you out of the CPU but at the lowest level can you interrupt an I/O process that is going to disk? I do know from experience that I have far fewer xruns running fluxbox than I do with KDE. I have done recording using both and if I'm doing fairly heavy disk I/O (say recording 8-10 tracks) I don't have as many problems with fluxbox. -- Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner The Fuzzy Dice http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html "As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously." Benjamin Franklin, on declining patents offered by the governor of Pennsylvania for his "Pennsylvania Fireplace", c. 1744

On Sun, 2006-02-19 at 23:14 +0100, Florian Schmidt wrote: This is much MUCH better with recent versions. Ubuntu Dapper loads almost as fast as XP here. Lee

On Sun, 2006-02-19 at 14:03 -0800, thewade wrote: Fluxbox doesn't have a menubar per se but you can easily do menus inside of menus. The right click in the root window menu is easily customizable. -- Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner The Fuzzy Dice http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html "As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously." Benjamin Franklin, on declining patents offered by the governor of Pennsylvania for his "Pennsylvania Fireplace", c. 1744

On 2/19/06, pirrone &lt;pirrone(a)localnet.com&gt; wrote: I second all the good stuff about fluxbox technically and its low system resource usage, but as a day to day environment for running stuff like Crossover Office, Open Office, etc., I got too tired having to make all my menus by hand. - Mark

On 2/19/06, pirrone &lt;pirrone(a)localnet.com&gt; wrote: Hi Frank, Oh, OK, I'll emerge fluxbox and take another look. After all, I have you to help me with any problems I have, right? My issues aren't around running something like Jack or Ardour. That's easy. I'm more concerned about all the Crossover Office Menus and the installation of Windows programs (Battery, Guitar Rig, Guitar Rig 2, Reaktor if it ever works) and all the stuff the Codeweavers folks put in their launchers. Without that stuff getting set up on the desktop and in the Gnome menus I'd find CXO almost impossible to use. I do have FVWM-Crystal onboard right now. It's really nice to look at and also has a very small footprint. Additionally it has a nice taskbar where stuff can go if I want to set things up that way, but setting the machine up for day to day use is not how I like to spend my time. It should 'Just Work'. But heck, now that I have you to work out all my problems for me life is good! Expect the root password in a separate email and then let me know when the emerges are complete, OK?! ;-) Cheers, Mark

On Sun, 2006-02-19 at 15:15 -0800, Mark Knecht wrote: Yep. That's why I only use fluxbox if I'm doing a recording session with a full band. -- Jan 'Evil Twin' Depner The Fuzzy Dice http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy.html "As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously." Benjamin Franklin, on declining patents offered by the governor of Pennsylvania for his "Pennsylvania Fireplace", c. 1744

Hallo, Mark Knecht hat gesagt: // Mark Knecht wrote: Personally I got tired of reaching for the mouse just to start some application a long time ago. I configured the often used applications like Rxvt or Firefox or Qjackctl to keyboard shortcuts using the otherwise useless "Windows"-key and a letter. My recommendation of using "screen" as a window manager wasn't a joke: Having a terminal running with 10 screen windows inside will let me start any application I want with a little Ctl-A-ing and typing and TABing in mere fractions of seconds. I always use the same couple of applications anyways. It's been a long time since I last started an application through a Menu entry. Linux still is a unix-like system with a very powerfull shell, that people should learn to use IMO. (Did I mention, that my file managers are cd, cp, ls, mv, mkdir and rm?) Once you get around to use the keyboard instead of Menus, the question of what X-window-manager is running becomes totally irrelevant or rather an aesthetic question: All window managers can move windows around, iconify them etc. Ciao -- Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__