gentoo + fluxbox +laptop = CRAZY FAST

ok so i was sick of having my messy install of gentoo on my laptop so i said whatever lets reinstall and this time ill speed things up by using a slimmed down window manager ie. IceWM, blackbox, fluxbox, and openbox (those are the most common)

ok so i did a little research to find out which is the best,

ok firs there is blackbox this is the original, openbox and fluxbox and a few other window managers are based off this wow must be good right? wrong its acctualy harder to use i felt (however some others would probly dissagree)

second i tried openbox, at first look i noticed the toolbar at the bottom that i didnt see in blackbox by default COOL !!!!

after blackbox theres fluxbox, now basicly i looked around a bit and found that even though fluxbox and openbox are acctualy almost identical fluxbox rules over openbox in a few ways

1 it comes with an automatic menu generator were i found that openbox lacked this (it might not but i couldent find it) they are acctualy both bad at generating the menu a gui app for this would be better but im no programmer

2 it seems to be more updated now again dont go by what i say there could be some people someweare updating openbox all the time i just dont know about them

ok so i decided to go with fluxbox in the end

ok so a window manager which you can tell by the name does exactly that it manages the windows nothing else no icons on the desktop or background for the desktop for this you need other apps

i looked around a bit and saw that feh was a good app for managing the desktop wallpaper so i grabbed that 1 command and wow works perfectly shoved it into the ~/.fluxbox/start file and i was good to go also feh was better then some others because it supported transparency for the windows and menus

ok so we all like to have somthing on the desktop to click and launch right? ok maybe not not everybody likes it but i like to have some on the bottom so i grabbed a program called idesk you can use the rox desktop for this too they both seem fairly even in how well they do it and they both also have a script for managing the desktop wallpaper into with them i just chose to use a smaller faster program for that.... anyways down to buisness looked online a little and found a config file for idesk created ~/.idesktop and added a few *.lnk files with the right info and bam shortcuts on the desktop easy and uses very little ram

then i grabbed conky (i know you all know what that is but if you dont) a sweet little app that runs on your desktop and shows you info about your system runs on very little and is very fast and flexible and also very customizable

after that i just used it very very fast runs GREAT i love it not as pretty as things liek kde, gnome, or xfce and doesnt wont let you use things like bery/compiz because well beryl and compiz are window manager which is the same thing as fluxbox and you cant have 2 running at the same time

fluxbox
screenshot