From the Desktop: I Stands For Ice, Ice, Baby and Introspection

By: Brian Proffitt
Tuesday, November 21, 2000 08:52:20 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/2671/1/

Welcome to the Future

As I write this, it is my birthday. I have been on this planet for nigh on 34 years now and while that is no longer classified as middle age, you would think I would be old enough to know not to use Vanilla Ice lyrics in the headlines of my articles.

Which goes to show how much I have learned along the way.

I am a member of the population that probably cringes the most when we get those annual e-mails telling us that "today's high school student never experienced Jimmy Carter" or something like that. We're right at that age that just borders the cusp of that kind of statement. Suddenly, because we are old enough to remember Pac Man or Pong, we're labeled as sort-of-kind-of old.

Don't worry, this is not going to be some depressing launch into the morbidness of age. Wait a few more years for that, when I launch full-tilt into my mid-life crisis (I already have the color of car picked out).

But I do have one observation to make: this is the age I knew I would be in the year 2000. This was the age that as a skinny little Midwestern kid surrounded by Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia posters I thought would be unbelievably old.

Well, here I am, and I don't feel that old. I can still play a fair game of ultimate Frisbee (when my knees work), I still can turn the heads of beautiful women (who usually have this weird befuddled look), and I still go out on dates (when my wife and I can get a babysitter).

Wait a minute...

On to the IceWM Capades

A lot of people new to Linux often point to KDE and GNOME as the desktop environments for Linux. This is absurd, of course, but the lack of robust features found in some window managers tends to reinforce this myth.

This is certainly not the case with IceWM, one of the most tightly run and robust window managers for X today.

We all have our personal preferences, of course, and I'm sure many of you will brand me some sort of heretic for stating this, but truth be told, I like this one a lot.

IceWM, a GNOME-compliant window manager, runs very well on its own, without the overlying GNOME layer. It is the default window manager linked with GNOME in the Debian distribution, so it's got a pretty big following already.

Some particular strengths of this interface are the taskbar and an easily configurable collection of setting files in ~/.icewm. Using some clearly written documentation available on the IceWm site, I was able to quickly get things set up the way I wanted them.

I realize that this is a comment I often make with other window managers, but you would be surprised at how many times I've had to whip out the secret decoder ring to figure out some of these configuration files.

The interface, at first glance, looks alarmingly like Windows, but once past that initial hurdle, it really is pretty functional. What was especially pleasing was the nice array of alternate themes contained in the default menu structure. These themes were inventive without being too distracting, like some of the more metallic GNOME themes can get sometimes.

Another nice feature of IceWM is the fact that it's pretty fast for all of the graphics it churns out. Granted, GNOME and KDE are no slouches in the speed department (though KDE2 troubles me) but IceWM ran a large number of applications without breaking a sweat.

IceWM is the creation of Slovenian Marko Macek, who, legend has it, created IceWM from nothing using C++. This makes it one of the few window managers out there that does not have a lineage of some kind. (Macek did not respond to a request for an interview before this article was posted, though if he does later, I will certainly give you his feedback.)

Looking at their Web site, though, one can easily determine that IceWM is a window manager that is very alive in development. Just last week (Nov. 15), the development team announced the release of Icedock, a Wharf-like application bar for IceWM. I tried it out myself, grabbing the statically linked binary files available on the site, and was pleased with its performance. The neat thing about this tool was it that fact that it supports Windowmaker and AfterStep docked applications, a statement I confirmed in my review runs.

IceWM falls into that category of interface that users tired of the heavy desktop environments should use when they don't want to go totally minimalist with something like FVWM. Use it when you feel like slimming down your interface and you won't be disappointed.