Re: Trying to get GUI'ed

[Chuck Gelm <nc8q@gelm.net>]

Hi, Paul:

 Lovely.  Your story sounds like what I want to do. :-)

 I have RedHat8.0 ('tho I see that this distro is not liked! :-|).
I'll try a few GUI install choices and what I can learn.

Although I am still confused about who is doing what,
with which, and to whom.

IOW, I do not understand the difference among:
Xwindows, Gnome, & Sawfish.

 To me, windows is windows, windows is what a GUI application needs
for I/O; a text console is what a text console application needs.
Sawfish, twm, Gnome, KDE, fvwm, fvwm95, are meaningless to me.
I don't see the difference. :-|
 Why cannot any GUI application run on any 'window'?
Why is not Xwindows a 'window manager'?
Why is not fvwm a 'Xwindow'?

 Please don't bother trying to answer these now.  I'll probably
get the gist by trying different things.  ;-)

Regards, Chuck

Paul Furness wrote:
> 
> Linux is slowly getting better and easier for people who don't want to
> spend hours fiddling with it, but it isn't quite there yet.
> 
> Ok, here's what I use:
> 
> I currently have Red Hat 7.3 installed on my workstation. I have been
> using Red Hat precisely because the installation is pretty friendly - I
> can chose to take one of the default installs, or I can customise most
> of the package choices.
> 
> At initial install, Red Hat doesn't give me 37 choices of which window
> manager to use. If I'm installing Red Hat and using their desktop (which
> is Gnome by default) then I'll get Sawfish as the window manager. I
> _can_ change that during the install if I really want to, but I don't
> actually _need_ to think about it to make it work. It works fairly well
> for most things, and although I am thinking of trying something else,
> it's partly because it's my _job_ to try different versions of things so
> that I can advise the people at my company what they should use.
> 
> If you want an easy install that includes a (relatively) nice GUI, then
> Red Hat may well be what you want.
> 
> By the way, I have found the Ximian Destop (which you install after X,
> window manger and Gnome/KDE) to be really quite reliable and useful. It
> seems to fix a lot of problems which I was having with Red Hat's default
> setup.
> 
> If you don't want to do that, then you are _choosing_ to do it the
> manual way, and that implies that you either have to install each option
> and try it, or read a load of documentation.
> 
> The reason I ended up with the window manager I have is that previous
> ones I've tried (like Afterstep, Enlightenment, gdm) all had something
> in them that I didn't like, couldn't do or didn't work with something
> else I was using. I can't tell you which ones are right for you
> precisely because I am not you. If you want to use Gnome, Sawfish is a
> good choice because it's _compatible_ with gnome right out of the box.
> Afterstep, for example, has some lovely graphical things it can do, but
> didn't work well with the menus I wanted to use - so I stopped using it.
> This was some time ago, though, so it may have changed by now. I promise
> that the best way to decide what you want is to try some.
> 
> If you don't have time to read lots, then chose a distribution that
> gives you useful defaults (I liked Red Hat until version 8 which is all
> strange and lacks most of what I like). If you don't have time to either
> read lots or get a different distribution or try different options, go
> and buy a Mac which gives you only a very few options and needs almost
> no setting up, but is proprietary and expensive.
> 
> Paul.
> 
> On Tue, 2002-10-22 at 01:00, Heimo Claasen wrote:
> > It would be interesting to go into more details with this, especially
> > in _comparing_ different window managers:
> >
> > > Incidentally, you don't _need_ a lot of the software you can get this
> > > way - just directly configuring X will give you access to most of the
> > > stuff. But you certainly need _some_ kind of window manager for it to be
> > > useful.
> >
> > Which is precisely what I'm looking for.
> >
> > Actual example: that most recent Debian-3 install gave me a choice of
> > three of them (gdm, kdm, xdm), and sure I was (newbie, thanks) at a loss
> > for what to do. _No_ usefull description/help what the heck the
> > difference would be.
> >
> > But there are differences, and crucial ones: I'm struggling since ages
> > to make a specific SCSI device run which quite obviously has some
> > collision course with "some" of the X (windows?) management components.
> > For instance, it would just not run under any of various Mandrake/KDE
> > installs; it did run (shortly) with a tweaked Debian-2.2 and and what I
> > was told was "window maker" (for some unrelated reason, that install had
> > to be changed, and the SCSI device never ran again there).  Finally, a
> > new Debian-3.0 install first _did_ have it run (there I was sure it was
> > xdm which was used, but on the "frame buffer" kernel _without_ the
> > XF86-..."4" install !) For again some unrelated reason, there had to
> > be a re-install of this very Debian; I used not the "frame buffer" but
> > the "compact" kernel install that time (more out of a feeling: there
> > is no intelligible info joined to these procedures), had later enormous
> > difficulties to get X working at all, and it never accepted the full
> > range of the high-resoulution screen, _despite_ it's use of the
> > XF86-.."4" version.  (Didn't manage to have it using the highest
> > resolution; which is the one exactly needed for photo jobs _as_well_as
> > the SCSI-connected film scanner.) But I chose "gdm" that time, and lo
> > and behold, the dang SCSI device worked.  No real use though, as the
> > full resolution screen is not available. Thank you.
> >
> > I haven't _got_ fifteen month of idle time to go through twentyseven
> > docs and sources in search of that ephemeral X screen handling detail
> > (and there I'm sure that its something like this, because te device
> > as such _does_ work) which collides with the device's output.
> >
> > Thus, instead of sending people from one wall to the other, like in
> > best kafkaesques traditions, it would be nice to have some clearly
> > worded information of what the differences _are_ between those window
> > managers.
> > At looking at each one of their own specific doc-novels separately I
> > would never ever get the _functional_ information I need, namely to find
> > the comparably "simplest" one with the least potential of skrewing up
> > the relation between the pixel output from that dang device and the wm's
> > (not-too- broad-integration-of-most-sophisticated) screen handling
> > elements.
> > (By now I'm quite sure that it's one of those thousand files-bits of the
> > Gtk environment which might be the culprit but to find that out would
> > mean another fifteen months more of work and missed pay for not done
> > real work.)
> >
> > // Heimo Claasen // <hammer at revobild dot net> // Brussels 2002-10-21
> > The WebPlace of ReRead - and much to read  ==>  http://www.revobild.net
> >
> > -
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> --
> Paul Furness
> 
> Systems Manager
> 
> 2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2.
> 
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