This penguin walks on a bed of blue screens of death!

[E Frank Ball]

On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 03:53:51PM -0700, Lincoln Peters wrote:
} That is, it works pretty well for me, because I know what I'm doing.  I 
} couldn't run GNOME or KDE on any of the workstations because they only have 
} 64MB of memory (aack!) and it is impossible to set up any sort of swap 
} device when netbooting.  By default, it now runs FVWM2 when users log in, 
} and the default configuration (at least it's the default in RedHat 7.1) will 
} probably get a big "Huh?" from everyone who looks at it.  It took me 30 
} seconds to figure out that I was supposed to click on the desktop to get any 
} kind of a Start menu (there was nothing at all like a "Start" button), so it 
} would probably take most people 30 minutes to figure it out.  I couldn't 
} find any session manager that was any frendlier and that didn't overload 
} that precious little 64MB of memory.  It's weird, though, because I remember 
} that in RedHat 6.1, FVWM had a "start" button.
} 
} Even worse, the "Programs" section of the menu is empty!  I can't see any 
} way that anyone besides myself would feel comfortable starting programs 
} using an XTerm!  I guess I'm somewhat spoiled because Ximian GNOME runs on 
} my home computer (it has 256MB of memory), so I have no experience with 
} setting up FVWM2 or any other session manager besides KDE.  Can anyone clue 
} me in on how configure it?

The default fvwm2 for RedHat is pretty pathetic.  The config file is
/etc/X11/fvwm2/system.fvwm2rc in case you hadn't found it.  Copy this to
.fvwm2rc in your home directory to customize it for you or change the
system file to change it for everybody.

SuSE has a lot of the applications in the root menus and the SuSEConfig
program keeps these menus up to date as you (un)install programs.
Unfortunately lifting the config file from SuSE to RedHat will break
most of the menus and icons.  You probably don't want to start from
scratch with SuSE huh?

I have some very custom fvwm2 environments, including one I use on my
HPUX machine.  I'd recommend a number of buttons in the fvwm control
panel for commonly used applications, that's pretty easy.  I don't use
the root pulldown menues much myself, so I don't have a lot in them.  I
either use the buttons or the command line.

One of the applications where I'm using fvwm2 is a "restricted" group
environment at work.  We have stations in manufacturing (at Agilent in
Rohnert Park) that use group logins so that anybody can walk up and use
them.  We don't want "anybody" to be able to access a command prompt,
mail program, or news program.  So there are some buttons to run the
applications they need to run under the group login, and if they need to
do something else, like start an xterm, they are prompted for their
personal login and password.  I had to turn off the pager on these
stations, that was too weird for users with no training, but they can
push the buttons and start things just fine.  Now I have to try to teach
them not to re-boot as a first resort when they can't figure something
out.  I wanted these accounts to use fvwm2 and only fvwm2 so I got rid
of the /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients file and replaced it with this:

#!/bin/bash 
exec fvwm2 

Works great.  Users can select whatever window manager they want from
the login screen and they get fvwm2.  I'm using Redhat 6.2 because
that's what my software runs on.

Between the faq on the fvwm.org web site, man fvwm2, and fooling around
with the fvwm2rc file it's not too hard to customize, but it can take a
while.  I started with the SuSE 5.2 system.fvwm2rc file, but not many
people would recognize it anymore.  Once you get the hang of it you can
crank out root menus and front panel buttons pretty quickly, but there
are no GUIs (vim is your friend).  There is also a mailing list where
people get help with config questions.

I'll put together some screen shots and the config files and try to get
them on the web.  In the meantime goto fvwm.org and check out some of
their screenshots and links.  My stuff is very different, I seem to be
bucking the latest window manager fashion trends, what can I say?  I
grew up with mwm.

-- 

   E Frank Ball                efball at efball.com