Tag Archives: WM

Awesome!!

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Hey guys (and girls),

For a long while I’ve been happily using Fluxbox, and actually I must say, that I started to get a little bored. The reason I moved to Fluxbox is to stay away from limiting-WM, like Unity or GNOME3. but after a while using Fluxbox, I felt I want something even more hardcore, that will give me even more control on my computer.

After a talk with my roommate (which just recently installed Linux, and quite quickly became a Linux master :D), We decided both to switch to Awesome WM, which from the current point of view, seems like a great decision!

Awesome is acutally named after Barney Stinson!

Awesome is acutally named after Barney Stinson!

Few words about Awesome and what makes it so awesome:
Awesome is a very lightweight, dynamic WM, in which you are able to modify just about anything. You have one (very long) configuration file named rc.lua, and yes, all the configuration is in Lua. actually the configuration is way more than just configuration, it’s the whole WM: widgets, toolbars, the way windows work, act and move, shortcuts, mouse actions, menus and more and more and more – everything is lua scripts, extremely configurable.

As I mentioned above, the configuration is huge lua file, containing just about anything in the wm, which makes it hard to read, and easy to mess. for that reason one of the first things I did after installing Awesome, is to split the configuration to several files, and by that making it very easy to understand and modify.
Of course that if I can think of something, probably it’s already in the internet, so after some googling I found phyber’s splitted rc.lua, which gave me a great something to start with 🙂

Some more stuff I wrote for my configuration:
– Language switcher (which made me write a patch for xkb-switcher)
– extremely generic startup autorun
– hacked Calendar35 a little bit to work with my local configuration

might wanna have a peek in my Github repository.

Anyways – any awesome users out there? I’m looking for tips, ideas, and mostly people for showing off from time to time (my gf isn’t impressed too much from my geeky shit :P)

Dor 🙂

Back to Flux

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Hey there all,

It’s been a while since i wrote last time. sorry for that, i’ve been really busy recently… Hope to find some more time to write in the future.

I decided to write again for a really good reason: After a really long time that i’ve been using a standard plain Ubuntu installation on my laptop, I decided to change back to Fluxbox! Hurray!

I hear many people saying how Ubuntu is getting lame lately, and how Unity is the worst WM ever. I extremely disagree. Ubuntu is going very straight forward toward their great goal: bringing Linux everywhere, and you can’t say they’re not trying their best. every time a new Ubuntu version is released the whole network is buzzing, once again Canonical broke the rules when playing with something that should never be touched in the UNIX world (Pidgin? GDM? GNOME? Xorg? remember all those?). Canonical has a vision, and they do w/e they can to get there. I don’t always agree with what they do, but they touch any taboo they can, and that’s awesome.

A word about Unity: it coud be better. for ex. i can’t see why they removed the 2d version, since compiz is a resources killer. I hate that they removed all the configurations gnome had, every time I enter Unity i feel in some kind of virtual prison, can’t touch anything can’t change anything, what’s linux in that?? 🙁
However, i fell in love with the HUD (Menus search), and probably will find a way to use it outside unity sometime soon.

So as i said, even though Unity has it’s own awesome features, for a long time I felt I no longer control my machine, and wanted to switch back to Fluxbox, but couldn’t find time.. Until now 🙂

Of course using anything different from Unity on Ubuntu isn’t always an easy task, and I had my own challanges on the way. I promise to publish some notes on hacks i’ve done to make my Linux work faster and look better.

Dor.