David L. Johnson wrote:
> I've seen a bit of chatter about window managers for Angstrom, and 
> wanted to know more about the alternatives.  I am using, now, the 
> default (I guess) matchbox setup.  It is OK, but navigation is slower 
> than I would like, and I can't manage much by way of customization.
> 
> What are the others like?  Links to screenshots??

Yes, usability of matchbox window manager is very bad, especially with
application not designed for one full-screen window (e. g. gqview
collections, drag and drop between windows). Also window switching is
not comfortable (tapping to title bar and guessing, which window is the
correct one; I did not find Alt+Tab or something similar). Switching
windows also crashes often, which shuts down the whole session.

icewm is in the angstrom repository, but it is totally misconfigured.
here are the steps I did to make it usable:

- Menu and launchpad are empty and session is completely unusable. I
  reverted back to matchbox session and replaced only window manager and
  disabled the icewm panel.

- It is preconfigured to use large fonts. Halve all values to get
  reasonable sizes.

- Altogether with broken xrandr (which fails to report current
  orientation), icewm fails to detect orientation and falls back to
  480x640 after calling xrandr. You have to send HUP signal to icewm to
  resize properly. But this sizes badly panel and desktop, so you have
  to restart them both (well you cannot restart them from zaurusd, but
  you can kill them; if you modify session to start them in loop, you
  will get what you need). If you do it, you will fail on bug 2571.
  I have hacks to prevent all of these problems, but they cause, that
  switching orientation takes about 15 sec.

- Icewm has no option to start fullscreen by default. Code change is
  probably required.

- I am not using PIM often, so I bind important window manipulation keys
  to launchpad keys at the bottom.

If you are interested in my hacks, I can publish them. Otherwise wait
for cleaning the stuff and putting to Bugzilla.


-- 
Stanislav Brabec
http://www.penguin.cz/~utx/zaurus


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