INICIO....... LINUX


ICEWM: The Window Manager


icewm_img00s




What's ICEWM (Ice Window Manager)

ICEWM is a Window Manager for XWindow (as KDE, GNOME, AfterStep or WindowMaker). The main difference between ICEWM and other Window Managers is that ICEWM offers lot for features with an small resource usage and using small disk size.

Using ICEWM has a lot for benefits for us and our machines:

  • Menu bar (toolbar) totally configurable, including it's location, direct link icons to applications, the way windows appear on the screen, clock, email notificator, CPU usage graphs, etc.

  • Virtual Desktops support.

  • You can define keybindings to launch your favourite applications.

  • You can make some applications to open directly on a preferred virtual desktop. An example: if we want Netscape to open always on the second virtual screen, we can make ICEWM to do it when we launch there whenever we want. ICEWM will open it on the 2nd desktop and will change to it automatically. This prevents us to open netscape and move it directly there with ICEWM's "Move to desktop" function.

  • We can make some applications not to appear on the task-bar or not to appear on the ALT+TAB change-window-cycle. This is quite useful when we exec applications such as System monitors that we don't change the focus to and we don't want it to appear on the taskbar (as Xosview or GKRellM).

  • Totally configurable menus via manual file edition or using KIceWM.

  • Configurable icons (xpm format).

  • You can configure ICEWM using graphical tools (IcePref or IceConf) or editing text config files directly..

  • Themes support (http://icewm.themes.org).

  • Minimun memory usage: just 1 to 2 Mb (comparte to KDE's 15 MB memory usage). This convers ICEWM on a really light Window Manager.

  • Minimun Disk needs: 700KB to 1200KB of disk space after installation.

  • Total stability: that's the most important when we work with X Window. Having a stable window manager it's perfect to work securely while not wasting our computer resources. ICEwm has small resource usage: TRANSMETA (the company where Linux Torvalds works) includes ICEWM as Window Manager on it's MIDORI LINUX, a reduced Linux used on PDAs and embebed decides).

  • A version called icewm-gnome with jpg support instead of xpm files (and extra features).


How ICEWM looks

You can see the default look of ICEWM on the first screenshot of this page (under the page title), but you can change it totally thanks to theme, background and icon support.


icewm_img01


My desktop while I edit this document on Kwrite (although I use vim :)



Next we'll see some captures of ICEWM with different themes and configurations:




Where to download ICEWM

We have different ways to get ICEWM and install it on our machines. First of all is, obviously, ICEWM's Web Page:

http://www.icewm.org

The direct URL to download it is:

http://www.icewm.org/index.php/download.html

You should get the tar.gz, rpm or deb package and install it on the standard way to install packages on your Linux distribution:

DEB: dpkg -i icewm-version.deb

RPM: rpm -i icewm-version.rpm

TGZ: tar xvzf icewm-version.tar.gz
     cd icewm-version
     ./configure
     make
     make install
You shouldn't need to go to ICEWM's Web page as ICEWM is included on almost all Linux distributions and is usually included on all Linux CDROMs. To install it we can follow this steps: 

DEBIAN:  If we have network connection:
         apt-get install icewm

         If we don't have network connection:
         [we insert the right Debian CDROM]
         mount /cdrom
         cd /cdrom
         find . -name "icewm*"
         cd directory
         dpkg -i icewm-version.deb

REDHAT,
SUSE,
MANDRAKE:
         [we insert Linux CDROM]
         mount /mnt/cdrom
         cd /mnt/cdrom
         find . -name "icewm*"
         cd directory
         rpm -i icewm-version.rpm
This will install the ICEWM package. If the package ask us for dependencies (that's, if we need extra packages to install icewm properly, as libxpm4 or xlib6g) we just let Debian to install it or we install it using RPM/DEB packages from Linux CDROM. Another valuable package is icewm-themes; it contains desktop themes to modify Icewm's default look.


How do I tell XWindow to use ICEWM

The next step is tell XWindow that we want to use Icewm when we launch it or we login under XDM, KDM or GDM with a given user. To do that we just need to modify a small configuration file where we'll add the "exec icewm" command.

If we launch XWindow using the "startx" command, the file to modify is the .xinitrc file under our HOME directory. If we use XDM, KDM or GDM, the file to change is the .xsession file under the same directory. If any of these files do not exist we just create it and give it execution permissions by executing "chmod +x filename"). Both files have the same syntax:

A .xinitrc or .xsession example:

  export LANG=es_ES
  exec icewm
If we want to launch applications automatically when we start XWindow we can use the same file before launching the Window Manager: 

  export LANG=es_ES
  exec gkrellm &
  exec icewm
On the previous example, next time we launch ICEWM, XFree86 will launch the CPU/Network/Disk monitor called GKRELLM automatically.


Next: Icewm's manual configuration


Page created by the "ICEWM-adicts" Santiago Romero, Javier Malonda, flytrap and Jose A. Calvo .

email-compiler@escomposlinux.org