I have posted my config file on the site here so that other people can learn from my fvwm configuring. I have also posted some more current screenshots of what my desktop looks like. Desktop 1 Desktop 2 Desktop 3 Desktop 4 Desktop 5

Here’s how my desktop works, its rather simple. I have two monitors. A 17 inch 1024×768 CRT on the left and a 1280×1024 LCD on the right. I hope to get one or two more identical LCD monitors so I can throw away the CRT. I’ll have to wait for the price to drop about $100 more or until I get a real job. Anyway, because the screens are different resolutions I don’t actually see the bottom portion of the left screen, but that’s ok because the software recognizes that I don’t see that area and acts as if it isn’t there. But scrot still takes a screenshot of it. On the top of the left screen I use torsmo to monitor my system and the time, etc. On the top of the right screen I have a taskbar and a pager in one horizontal bar. There is a panel for launching applications that appears if you put the mouse all the way in the top right of the screen. If you right click on the desktop a main menu appears with all sorts of handy options. And if you alt-tab a nice window switching menu appears. Everything behaves pretty much as you would expect. One nice thing I did was if you left click on a maximize button it causes that window to grow horizontally and vertically until it comes into contact with other windows or screen edges. Also if you right click on a maximize button it causes the window to grow to fill its entire screen. And that’s most of how my desktop works. If you really want to experience it yourself you can run fvwm and use my configuration file. I will update the configuration file on the site and the screenshots whenever I make a significant change.

You might be thinking what this has to do with the ultimate desktop project. Well, up until now I’ve been using Xfce4.05. It’s pretty good. It has a nice graphical control panel and simple seperate components. I don’t use the panel, but I do use xfdesktop and the taskbar and such. However, it isn’t perfect. The weak xinerama support annoys me among many other small things. The yet to be released Xfce4.2 supposedly fixes many of these things. Yes, it is much improved, but it still isn’t exactly what I want. Thinking along the Gentoo philosophy I decided that with enough time and effort spent I could get the exact desktop environment that I wanted. I could do it even if it meant making themes by hand, writing a window manager from scratch, or modifying the code of Xfree86/Xorg.

So the first step was to have a window manager rodeo. I couldn’t think of a word to use instead of rodeo that sounded good, deal with it. In the process I discovered many things. First off, very few window managers are unique. Enlightenment, ion, xfce, gnome, kde and ratpoison seemed to be the only ones that stood out among the crowd. Open/Black/Fluxbox, pekwm, fvwm, windowmaker, they all seemed the same to me. They give you a blank screen maybe with one or two small widgets. They also provide a menu when you right click the desktop. The rest is up to you to customize. I couldn’t understand why someone felt the urge to make a new wm when so many exactly like it already existed.

Then fate came to me on the Gentoo forums. There is a monthly thread where people post pictures of their desktops. In the thread someone said “isn’t taviso great?” I said “what is taviso?” I thought it was a piece of software, but I couldn’t emerge it. esearch -Sc taviso came up with no results. I was informed quickly that taviso was the “god of fvwm” and also a Gentoo dev. Apparently he used xvidcap to make a video demonstrating his desktop instead of just screenshots. I checked out his video and was blown away. When I tried fvwm2 I could only get it to look like twm plus a pager panel and taskbar with a very ugly “raw X” theme. You wouldn’t even know he was using fvwm unless he told you. According to the mother of all fvwm threads which he started he claims that “fvwm can do anything”. Ladies and gentlemen it looks like I found my solution. With considerable time and effort I can use fvwm to create the ideal desktop for me.

So here I go. I’ve created a brand new user on my machine with an empty home folder. I am also going to create a project website for my ultimate desktop experiment. This experiment will work as follows. First I will, on real paper, design my ideal desktop environment. I will not assume that anything is impossible. The only limits I put on my desires are those imposed by my computer hardware, the Linux kernel and X. Everything else will be fair game. Items in the plan will be separated by component. I will design my ideal panel, taskbar, menus, window decorations, pager, etc. After that I will go through the list and mark off which items I think are far off. By far off I mean items which are either obviously difficult to implement and/or not absolutely necessary. I will consider the project complete even if none of these items is implemented. Note, this initial plan will only contain functional requirements. e.g: there will be a menu with these items that works like this. The final part of the project will be theme. Animations, icons, colors, backgrounds, etc. All come afterwards. However, sometimes color/theme is part of functionality. Having a different color background depending on desktop and page is functional. Which background colors I choose is a matter of theme and that comes later.

After I make the plan and make web pages out of it I will put a link to the page here. My first hope is that my ideal desktop is created and I get to experience my perfect computing experience. Second I hope that other people can use the project to learn about fvwm and make their own computer experience better. I know almost nothing about fvwm right now, so other will be able to learn along with me. Third I hope that I can prove taviso wrong. I’m sure there is something I want that fvwm can’t do. Of course, this is a contradictory hope. It would kind of suck if what I wanted wasn’t possible, but slightly satisfying that I can confirm to myself that fvwm is not the be all end all of window managers. I would definitely rather have it work though. In a perfect world I would get everything I wanted but simultaneously discover something impossible. Anyway, I’m going for it, watch this space.