Desktop environments Archive

Enlightenment 0.16.8.9 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-08-11 Desktop environments 31 Comments

Enlightenment 0.16.8.9 has been released. It contains several bugfixes and other improvements. "Version 0.16 of the Enlightenment window manager was released in 2000, along with its dependencies Imlib and Fnlib, and remains in heavy usage today. While rumors of its death still circulate, DR16.8.9 was released on August 11th, 2007, and it remains in development today with a long life still ahead of it. DR16 has been the choice of power users and artists due to its low overhead, highly graphical, widely theme-able, extremely configurable, yet unobtrusive interface. Nearly all functions of the window manager can be handled without mouse input, including application launching via e16keyedit. It also remains highly portable, with ports avalible for Linux on all platforms, FreeBSD, IRIX, Solaris X86 and Sparc, HP-UX, AIX, OS/2, and more."

Openbox 3.4.4 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-08-06 Desktop environments 38 Comments

Openbox 3.4.4 has been released. "Openbox is a minimalistic, highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support. Openbox lets you bring the latest applications outside of a full desktop environment. Most modern applications have been written with GNOME and KDE in mind. With support for the latest freedesktop.org standards, as well as careful adherence to previous standards, Openbox provides an environment where applications work the way they were designed to."

Openbox 3.4.3 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-07-25 Desktop environments 16 Comments

Openbox 3.4.3 has been released. "Openbox is a minimalistic, highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support. Openbox lets you bring the latest applications outside of a full desktop environment. Most modern applications have been written with GNOME and KDE in mind. With support for the latest freedesktop.org standards, as well as careful adherence to previous standards, Openbox provides an environment where applications work the way they were designed to."

dwm-4.3 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-07-15 Desktop environments 14 Comments

A new release of dwm is out, dwm-4.3. "dwm Is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled and floating layouts. Either layout can be applied dynamically, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed."

Openbox Window Manager Grows up

Thom Holwerda 2007-07-11 Desktop environments 11 Comments

"If you want an adaptable window manager that doesn't drain your resources, try Openbox. Its latest version, 3.4.2, released this month, has several visual improvements and dozens of new usable features. Since it's easy to customize, many people replace their stock window managers with Openbox. It can run inside both GNOME and KDE (but not Xfce), replacing their native window managers. It can also be used as a lightweight desktop environment on its own."

Using ROX with Ion

Thom Holwerda 2007-07-09 Desktop environments 13 Comments

"Spending too much time organising your windows instead of getting things done? Tiling window managers aim to handle the layout for you. In this article, I'll show how to configure Ion 3 to work with ROX. The basic idea of a tiling window manager is to use all of the screen space for windows, without gaps or overlapping. So, if you have two windows side-by-side and you make one of them a bit bigger, the other one shrinks to make room. I often have several source files open, plus a couple of terminals and maybe a log viewer, so I started looking for something to make things a bit slicker."

Ion3 RC3 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-07-08 Desktop environments 22 Comments

The third release candidate for Ion3 has been released. "This third 'rc' release again simply fixes some minor problems in the previous release." Get it from the download page. Ion is a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind.

OpenMotif 2.3 Released

Submitted by Oliver 2007-06-27 Desktop environments 16 Comments

"The OpenMotif Project Team announced today the release of OpenMotif 2.3, marking the most significant version of OpenMotif since it was released to the open source community in May 2000. OpenMotif 2.3 includes major feature enhancements and over 25 bug fixes requested by developers of enterprise applications. OpenMotif is the publicly licensed version of Motif, the industry standard user interface toolkit for UNIX systems provided on more than 200 hardware and software platforms including HP, IBM, Sun, SGI, and Linux (Red Hat and Novell SUSE)."

ROX-Filer 2.6.1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-06-11 Desktop environments 5 Comments

ROX-Filer 2.6.1 has been released. ROX-Filer is the filemanager at the core of the ROX desktop. "Some problems with session management were fixed. This makes it easier to use ROX-Filer with gnome-session and similar. When creating thumbnails, we can now use a thumbnail embedded in an Exif image, which speed things up. A couple of build problems were fixed."

Ion3-rc2 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-06-08 Desktop environments 21 Comments

The second release candidate for Ion3 has been released. "This is the second 'rc' release, and contains primarily bug fixes and other minor improvements." Get it from the download page.

Openbox 3.4 Released

Submitted by Michael K. Thung 2007-06-06 Desktop environments 7 Comments

"After a very productive series of preview releases, Openbox 3.4 is here! If you haven't yet, we'd really like to recommend that you read through the 'Upgrading to 3.4 guide', which is on the Openbox web site, here. The number of changes since 3.3.1, as you'll know if you've been following the preview releases, can be a little overwhelming. The upgrading to 3.4 guide talks about most of them, along with pretty pictures to show many of the new features."

Keyboard-Driven Environments Open a New Window

Thom Holwerda 2007-05-31 Desktop environments 48 Comments

"If you use a traditional desktop like GNOME or KDE, a keyboard-controlled desktop with a minimum of utilities may seem like stepping back 10 or 15 years in the history of interface design. Why bother, when traditional desktops are easy to use and RAM and disk space are so cheap nowadays?" On a related note, there is a new release of xmonad, a tiling window manager for X, written in Haskell. It now has full Xinerama and XRandR support, so you can add, remove, or rotate monitors on the fly.

dwm 4.2 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-05-30 Desktop environments 6 Comments

A new release of dwn is available. "dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled and floating layouts. Either layout can be applied dynamically, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed. It is the little brother of wmii."

Dwm 4.1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-05-22 Desktop environments 19 Comments

Dwm 4.1 has been released. "dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled and floating layouts. Either layout can be applied dynamically, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed. It is the little brother of wmii."

AfterStep 2.2.6 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-05-22 Desktop environments 8 Comments

AfterStep 2.2.6 has been released. As was the case with the last release, the changelog simply reads: "Everything got touched. It's all good." If you have 2.1.0 or later installed, you can use the upgrade package. Alternatively, you can wait for your distribution to package it for you.

ROX: Xfce Integration

Thom Holwerda 2007-05-16 Desktop environments 13 Comments

"A while ago Thomas Leonard wrote about Ubuntu integration and asked the question 'Can we get rid of ROX-Session?'. This inspired me to attempt to replace it with the Xfce session manager and it turns out that it is both easy to do and works very well."

Initial Implementation of Desktop Icons in E17

Submitted by Carl 2007-05-16 Desktop environments 39 Comments

E17 is maturing, and the TODO that needs to be completed for its release is shrinking. Desktop icons are now working in E17 cvs, and you can use drag and drop between the file manager and the desktop. "Icons on the desktop. A work in progress. you will need ~/Desktop to exist with stuff in it. i suggest copying some of the favorites files over (home.desktop etc.)." There's even a screenshot.

Ion3 RC1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-05-06 Desktop environments 21 Comments

The first release candidate of Ion3 has been released. "This is the first 'rc' or '(stable) release candidate' release of Ion3. This means that there will not be any further major changes to it. Bugs will be fixed, and as an exception to the general feature freeze, some hooks may still be added, if deemed useful. Translations may also be included. After no new bugs (that can not be deemed features) have been found in this or following 'rc' releases, the stable Ion3 will be released."

Enlightenment 0.16.8.7 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-05-04 Desktop environments 12 Comments

E16 version 0.16.8.7 and epplets version 0.10 are now available for download. "Add option to show windows on all desks in focus list. The CM now renders to the composite overlay window. Fix various updates when external background changes." Many more fixes are in the changelog.

AfterStep 2.2.5 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-04-27 Desktop environments 5 Comments

AfterStep 2.2.5 has been released. The AfterStep team released the following changelog: "Everything got touched. It's all good." You can get the latest release from the download page; if you have 2.1.0 or later already installed you can use a smaller upgrade package.