[GRLUG] Deskop Managers

[Michael Mol]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 4:01 PM, Lee Forest <lee8oi at gmail.com> wrote:
> In Ubuntu. or at least 8.10 I can't find the inittab file to edit
> whether or not I want graphical login.

For my desktop machine, I simply removed the gdm package. (And made
sure I didn't have xdm or kdm installed.)

> Plus I guess I would have to
> freshen up on how to configure startx to load the window manager I
> want....I believe it was the .xsession file in the home directory?

or .Xsession.  startx should still have Debian's man page, which is decent.

> this is something I haven't done since my slackware days. course
> ubuntu seems to have switched things around(god knows why) definitly
> wouldn't be hard tho. I've done much more complex tasks. I just have
> to figure out what ubuntu replaced those files with. But there was
> mention of wmii. Anyone concur with this being a good replacement for
> gdm on ubuntu 8.10? I've never actually heard of wmii before so its
> new to me.

*I* use wmii (and I'm the one who mentioned it), but it has a learning
curve.  The first time you run it, it'll pop up a list of all the
keyboard shortcuts.  Here's a starter course:

On my system, META is the left Alt key.

META-p -- Start a program.  Hit META-p and type the command-line name
of the program.
META-l -- Switch focus to the window on the right
META-SHIFT-l -- move window to the right
META-k - Switch focus to the window above
META-SHIFT-k move the window up
META-j - Switch focus to the window below
META-SHIFT-j move the window down
META-j - Switch focus to the window to the left
META-SHIFT-j - Move window to the left
META-? - Switch view to virtual screen "?" where ? is a number
META-SHIFT-? - Move window to virtual screen "?" where ? is a number
META-SHIFT-(space) - Move window to free mode layer (behaves somewhat
like windows do in GNOME, KDE or Windows)
META-(left click) - Drag window in free mode layer around
META-(right click) - Resize window in free mode layer

Moving the mouse without META automatically shifts focus to the window
under the mouse.

There are key combinations involving multiple monitors, but I don't
have multiple monitors so I don't have them memorized.  There are also
keys allowing alphabetical tagging of windows, but I don't remember
what they are.  These are the commands I've learned after using wmii
for a year.

-- 
:wq