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Open Source Software Linux

Fluxbox 1.3.6 Released 63

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
jones_supa writes: After nearly two years since the previous release, the Fluxbox team has released version 1.3.6 to start off the new year. Like most Linux geeks already know, Fluxbox is the long-standing X window manager derived from Blackbox. The new version (announcement) puts emphasis on quality assurance and takes care of fixing a bunch of critical bugs: clocktool problems, rendering long text, race condition on shutdown, lost keypresses after workspace switch, corruption of fbrun-history, and resize and move problems. The two new features are an ArrangeWindowsStack action and treating Windows with a WM_CLASS as DockApp as DockApps. Translations for Bulgarian, Hebrew and Japanese also got updates. The Fluxbox project sends many thanks to all the contributors.
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Fluxbox 1.3.6 Released More

Fluxbox 1.3.6 Released

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  • Congrats (Score:4, Interesting)

    by by (1706743) ( 1706744 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @09:20PM (#48751569)
    Fluxbox on an old Slackware laptop got me through college. Good stuff, though I have since moved on to i3wm [i3wm.org].
    • I've seen a lot of love for i3wm, so riddle me this: what user-visible advantages does it have over other tiling window managers? I just keep finding stuff about how nice the code is.
      • I actually haven't played around with too many tiling wms -- I used dwm for awhile, but that is somewhat limited. I switched to i3 and it just does everything I need it to do -- very simple, great multi-monitor support, and I can tile/arrange things pretty much exactly the way I want. That said, I'm sure there are other great tiling wms that would do exactly what I want, too =)

  • Wayland / serious question (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What will happen to alternative window managers like Fluxbox once Wayland starts replacing X? (and I suppose other things like Mir as well as Wayland)

    • That will happen when it's the year of the Linux desktop.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I put the question this way: when will Fluxbox get Wayland support?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Billly Gates ( 198444 )

      Wayland is just like X. A framework to build gui stuff on. It is X compatible too and supports the protocol.

      What is the big deal?

      Infact I remember something called the Unix Haters Manual which has a large section about X. I remember X back in 1998. It is a POS! It took 70% of the ram in my system.

      You all hate it and think it is GOD because you are reading this on an i5 with gigs of ram. But trust me no openGl, true type fonts, 100% of all ram in a 8 meg system, wrong XFree86.conf file meant fried monitors,

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 )

        Wayland is just like X. A framework to build gui stuff on. It is X compatible too and supports the protocol.

        No, it isn't compatible with X, no more than Windows or OXS is compatible with X (both can run an X server).

        Wayland's view of the world is essentially a bunch of surfaces, collections of which belong to programs. a program can draw updates to the surface then inform Wayland that the drawing updates are done.

        The wayland compositor is on the other end and decids how to draw the surfaces to the screen (

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )

        It is X compatible too and supports the protocol.

        Wayland is an API for creating / destroy / rendering windows as graphical surfaces and handling input events. Wayland is implemented by a compositor, e.g. Weston. Neither Wayland nor Weston gives a damn about X in any way shape or form. If you want to run X apps then you'd run the Xwayland server which uses wayland as its backend and hosts clients through X11 protocol. I expect most dists that switch to wayland would seamlessly fire up the server if its needed although over time more and more applications w

      • The Unix Haters Handbook is online: http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/ww... [mit.edu]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )

        It is a POS! It took 70% of the ram in my system.

        You've forgotten that "top" reported 100% of the memory in the video cards as used by X and then added that to what X was using onboard.
        It was amusing in machines with large video cards when it reported that X was using more memory than was on the motherboard.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      The need for a window manager doesn't go away because of Wayland. Wayland provides a reference implementation of a compositing window manager called Weston but its likely that others will appear. The role is somewhat different since windows are decorated client side but a wm would still provide functionality such as drag & drop, resize, maximize / minimize, snapping them to edges, animation / effects, remote access etc.

      • How does the client decide how to do the decorations? Does that mean you'll see a KDE application use a KDE theme with minimize/maximize/close buttons, and a GTK3 application will have a Gnome-like theme with only the close button and not "minimize"?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )
      The most alternative of them, Enlightenment, now has a better Wayland compositor than the Wayland project has - which sadly didn't stop Daniel Stone making fun of the earlier e16 in his Wayland presentations just like he makes fun of X where a lot of the Wayland code is borrowed from. So all Wayland needs now is some applications and some people who want to use them. They have no excuses since others are giving them a lot of help.
      If Wayland takes off then fluxbox etc may follow with support for it, and si

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbolden ( 176878 )

      Wayland doesn't have window managers in quite the same sense they will be totally incompatible (excluding the X11 layer that runs on top of Wayland). However there is nothing to stop there from being multiple flavors of window management under Wayland. So there will be a generational shift.

  • works well enough (Score:3)

    by X0563511 ( 793323 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @10:05PM (#48751757) Homepage Journal

    I've got it on my server. When you absolutely need a display (rarely) fluxbox inside a VNC server does the job and stays out of the way.

    • "I've got it on my server. When you absolutely need a display"

      Can you please point out some examples of these needs?

      • Re:works well enough (Score:5, Informative)

        by MikeBabcock ( 65886 ) <mtb-slashdot@mikebabcock.ca> on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @12:23AM (#48752325) Homepage Journal

        You have a remote APC UPS and you need to configure some obscure option through their stupid GUI application (and can't find the serial protocol reference).
        You want to configure a remote printer that has a JAVA interface that's slow and won't properly load over a port forward.
        You have an X app you normally just forward through SSH but you're on a terrible connection and don't want the app to keep getting killed by reconnecting.
        You want to verify how the Intranet page loads locally to the user without taking over someone's desktop.
        Some asinine printer driver comes with a GUI installer and you just really need to get through it once.

      • Sure, when you're running VMs and those VMs don't have SSH or serial consoles configured yet. The RDP server for virtualbox for example is not available unless you install Oracle's proprietary extensions.

        So, I'll SSH in, start vnc, start my client, and connect via SSH tunnel. Fire up virtualbox, play around on the console until SSH can do the job.

        (If I had a choice I'd have just put ESX on the host, but it's not an option. Even if it was, it would have to be one of those custom ISOs since it isn't officiall

  • Fluxbox is the best (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Fluxbox runs on my EeePC with OpenBSD. I can't imagine needing GNOME or KDE. Fluxbox does everything I need, and stays out of the way. It's simple flexibility, perfected. Kudos!

  • "treating Windows with a WM_CLASS as DockApp as DockApps."

    Well, if it walks like a DockApp and talks like DockApp, it's probably a DockApp.

    P.S. - I like words better when they actually say things.

  • After nearly two years since the previous release, the Fluxbox team has released version 1.3.6 to start off the new year. Like most Linux geeks already know, Fluxbox is the long-standing X window manager derived from Blackbox. The new version (announcement) puts emphasis on quality assurance and takes care of fixing a bunch of critical bugs: clocktool problems, rendering long text, race condition on shutdown, lost keypresses after workspace switch, corruption of fbrun-history, and resize and move problems.

    It only took two years for the open source community to implement these fixes, meanwhile Team M$FT is still trying to figure out how to optimize their HOSTS files like a bunch of n11bs.

  • FVWM95 FTW (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    fluxbox is for the linux bourgeois.

  • I know what it is (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Osgeld ( 1900440 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @12:10AM (#48752273)

    but the description of it in this summary is pointless

      "Like most Linux geeks already know, Fluxbox is the long-standing X window manager derived from Blackbox"

    lets say I am not a linux geek, I have linux but its ubuntu or min and whatever ships with that is all I know as far as desktops go? what is fluxbox? oh its derived from blackbox, gee fucking thanks for that useful bit of info, so why even have it in there?

  • All these things are sooo 20th century. It is skuemorphic and uses real world objects and menus to display things. Oh bad bad bro from my art professor.

    I want my cell phone interface. It needs to be all white and flat and only 1 app at a time man. I just can't handle this and XP. It makes me wanna cry as computers really are not calculators that do all these complicated things. They are an appliance!

  • If Dice wanted to track releases, they should have kept freshmeat viable. ... I guess they are missing that traffic now that we have freshcode.club.
    Pretty soon this site will just be randomly AI-selected tech news feeds and commenting will be disabled to reduce maintenance cost.

  • What a well-written summary.
    It told me what Fluxbox was, why it was important, why this announcement was important, and didn't make me feel stupid for not knowing about it already (since I'm not a linux geek). I'd wish more announcements would follow this pattern.

  • Big thanks to the developers. I find it very useful no matter how powerful the system (including very modern systems). Though nice, KDE and GNOME are too complex for me.

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