Loading up a lightweight GUI

I read a good thread a while back where someone stated Debian is where you end up with linux, not where you start. This makes sense to me, lots of people start up with Ubuntu or Suse or another well packaged distro, get their feet wet and find out they love linux, then start bumping into the limitations of the distro they are in and start hunting around. I think graphical environments seem to be a similar journey for many people.

Typically "newbie" distros default to full blown Gnome or KDE and they are both wonderful environments to work in, but many people feel they are too bloated. Don't get me wrong, I'll confess I've run both of them quite a bit over the years and I still run Gnome as the default on my primary laptop.

Taking one step away from the two huge environments we have XFCE. I ran Xubuntu 6.06 when it came out as my primary OS for about 6 months, and I've heard many people say XFCE is a wonderful balance between the niceties of a full graphical environment and the lightweight window managers we'll be discussing shortly. Because XFCE is all gtk under the hood it plays very well with Gnome utilities. If you are looking to take your first step out of Gnome or KDE and want to get your toes wet, XFCE is a great next step for many.

At the farthest end of the GUI spectrum from Gnome and KDE are a slough of basic window managers. People may have heard of these lesser known window managers, but people rarely seem to give them more than one boot before switching back to what they already know. It's true that there is curve to getting familiar with any of the lightweight window managers, but there was a big curve to switching to linux already and that was pretty rewarding wasn't it?

So over on the side of the blog there is a link for the old Linux Reality podcast, a few years back Chess did a few episodes about the differences between all the different window managers. I'd suggest going out and listening to them as they are great information and that podcast was very entertaining.

So bringing around our problem at hand, we have a pure CLI netinstall of Debian and I'd like a graphical envionment to run some apps I like. I've tried most wm's to hit the street over the last decade or so and I personally love fluxbox. It's not as skinny as some, it might be missing a feature from some other WM, but I really love the balance it holds. To me fluxbox is:
- well documented
- very mature
- highly customizable
- potentially beautiful
- very lightweight

You should try out a bunch of window managers, maybe you'll like icewm or rat poison better. For this little Debian box let's drop on some fluxbox to play with. We'll need to boot up and su to root, then we can run through the setup. First we need to get xorg, this is the package that any graphical environment will sit on top of:
debian:/home/thom# aptitude install xorg

That burns about 120Mb, but that's the cost of having a GUI. Next we will fetch fluxbox:
debian:/home/thom# aptitude install fluxbox

And that burns another 7Mb. First thing you'll notice is that you are still in the command line interface. Just because we've installed it doesn't tell linux we want to use it. Ain't that cool? If you are ready to experience the wonder of fluxbox, type exit to leave root and as your normal user launch X:
thom@test:~$ startx















... and BEHOLD! Oh wait, yeah it really doesn't look like anything. If a netinstall of Debian is a blank canvas of an operating system, fluxbox is a blank canvas of window manager. Go ahead and right click somewhere on the desktop, this is how you pull up a menu in fluxbox. Go ahead and poke around the menus and see whats in there. If you have the scrolling issue in the screenshot I've attached, click on the Configuration menu, choose Toolbar, and put the Placement at Top Center and you should be alright. At the bottom of the main menu you see "Exit" that just takes you back to the command line interface, click that and shutdown normally whenever you're ready.