From the Desktop: E Stands for EPIwm and Epidemic
By: Brian Proffitt
Tuesday, November 28, 2000 08:22:42 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/2701/1/
Out of Order
I knew it.
I knew this would happen. It's like a natural law: try to do a comprehensive review of the X window managers and you end up missing one along the way.
For someone with a scientific background, I have a very unscientific method of finding window managers to write about: I look at Matt Chapman's excellent Window Managers for X site and select window managers from there in an alphabetical fashion. I was up to the I's with IceWM last week, but a few things happened this month that are causing me to back up and cover some missed ground.
First, a young French student contacted me over the holiday and asked me if I'd heard of his project EPIwm and would I want to take a look at it? Mind you, my first instinct was to ask him to change the name of the interface to something that begins with the letter J, but I decided to forget that idea. Up until now, Franco-Proffitt relations have been rather strained, ever since a minor brouhaha with French customs officials in 1987. I didn't want to push my luck. I did take a look at EPIwm, and I'll tell you about it in a moment.
Another reason I'm backing up is because earlier this month, I was sick. You may not have noticed it, since I tend to write even better when I'm not entirely lucid, but I had a nasty bout with the flu nonetheless. Writing in this state is not too hard--I just have to double-check and make sure I have not written anything really silly. So if I missed something, like mixing up the name of my favorite comic book with the name of a popular desktop environment, please forgive me.
Though I managed to limp to the computer and hack out some nonsensical prose (as opposed to today, when I walked hale and hearty to the computer to type out some nonsensical prose), I was remiss in getting out my interview questions to the creator of FVWM95, Hector Peraza. It turned out that he was sick that week too, so he could not send me a reply until this past week.
And you thought the life of a Web reporter was all glamour and fame.
So, in honor of these events, and the re- re- re-counting going on in the fine state of Florida, I hereby proclaim a do-over, a Mulligan, with no Supreme Court ruling necessary.
This Isn't Some Civil War Diorama
When people in my age group were kids, school projects rarely went more technical than the occasional science project that tried to find out how many different kinds of penicillin would grow on the old sandwich found at the bottom of your locker. Oh sure, there was the inevitable supernerd who discovered how to map the genome of a housecat, and the spoiled rich kid whose family attorney put together a scientific patent display, but those were exceptions.
By the time we got to college, academic output mostly came in the form of papers. And theses. And more papers. With the occasional presentation for communications class mixed in for a little spice.
Nowadays, there seems to be no limit to what students can do for their schools. We read stories every day about collegiate e-business incubators that are turning out sophomore proto-millionaires in droves. At Ecole Pour l'Informatique et les Techniques Avancées (EPITA) in France, some students are putting together their own window manager.
Julien Mulot is the project manager for EPIwm, the X window manager he and fellow team members diablero and troll began putting together in October of 1998. Two years later, version 0.5-5 is stable and ready for use.
EPIwm features a menu-driven interface with configurable windows that can be iconified, shaded, maximized, minimized, sliced, diced, and pureed. If you want to do it to a window, it can certainly be done in this window manager.
Mulot explained that EPIwm was their choice for a school project during their second year at EPITA. EPIwm was put together primarily from scratch, using C as the programming language. It was not based on any other window manager, though Mulot said, "we looked to fvwm2 and Blackbox source code for some technical points."
I thought EPIwm was very stable and pretty quick, too. It definitely runs better by itself then underneath GNOME, which will work, but there are lots of interface conflicts. Mulot confirmed that EPIwm is not compliant with GNOME or KDE.
"No, and I don't think we will do it," he stated, "because it's not the purpose of EPIwm. EPIwm has been created to have a small, fast and configurable GUI, not to have a desktop."
Unlike other development teams scattered across the planet whose members may never meet face to face, the EPIwm team worked together every day.
"We are in the same class," Mulot explained. "Each month we distributed tasks. But we worked in the same room each night, so when someone had a problem, the others could help him."
EPIwm is a small, efficient window manager perfect for those looking for speed and simple configuration. The configuration files' syntax was very easy to understand, which I certainly appreciated. I was able to reconfigure the menus for the interface in just a few minutes.
Setup was a snap, with files available from a source tarball, or binary RPM and DEB packages.
The plans for EPIwm are to keep it from ballooning into something huge, according to Mulot.
"Soon, I'll release a new version to fix few memory leaks," he said. "It will have to be more ICCCM compliant. But I don't think that we will add some major features, to keep EPIwm small."
How to Eat an Elephant? One Bite at a Time...
A few weeks ago, I looked at FVWM95, the apparent clone of FVWM, and did not form any powerful conclusions. This was glaringly apparent by the incomplete nature of the article I posted. One talkback on Linux Today caught the lack of meat to the story (I feel your pain, Todd W!) and another editor from Linux Magazine praised me on the quality of the BS I produced.
One does what one can.
As I mentioned earlier, I was sick, and babbling something about evil twins. It made sense at the time, but what the article really needed was an in-depth interview with the creator of FVWM95, Hector Peraza.
Step into the Wayback Machine, kids, for here's the rest of the story...
FVWM95, on the surface, really does look and feel a lot like FVWM2, but the goal of the development team is far different. Peraza initially began developing FVWM95 because of a rare liking of Windows 95.
"It started as some kind of experiment, since the fvwm code was available," Peraza explained, "I wanted to modify it to see how my Linux desktop would look like with the Windows look."
Peraza stayed with the programming, working in many Windows features he found useful.
"I tried to replicate the look as exactly as possible: 3D-borders, buttons, title bar, mini-icons, taskbar... I liked the results and decided to stay with it," he said.
The coding was not without its share of humor either.
"I used FVWM95 as a joke too," Peraza related. "Once I compiled it on a DEC station of a friend of mine and told him I had erased UNIX and installed WindowsTM...you should have seen his face!"
Despite the antipathy many Linux users feel towards the Spawn of Microsoft, Peraza was pleased with how well his window manager was accepted. Though, initially, he had not planned to release it at all.
"I didn't really plan to make FVWM95 publicly available until I saw somewhere on Internet the screen shots of somebody trying to achieve the same results by changing FVWM's configuration file," Peraza said, "I realized then that other people could also benefit from my work and that day I made all the files available at my machine's ftp directory and posted a note to FVWM's discussion list.
"Many people were immediately scared with the idea--they didn't want to associate in any way UNIX with Windows. But on the other hand, I started having several hundreds of downloads per day, and receiving a lots of e-mails (my record was about 1400 e-mails in a month)."
Pleased with the strong response for his new window manager, Peraza did not rest on his laurels, and is striving to perfect his creation even today. Among his target goals are a general code cleanup, a redesign of the module interface, better colormap handling, and improved interaction between FVWM95 and applications.
A lot of these changes will come about when the window manager is reused with the xclass library Peraza is creating in the fOX Project.
"The xclass library is a C set of classes intended to be used when developing applications with win95 look and feel," he explained. "It implements a basic set of widgets like menus, buttons, list boxes, icons, etc. as well as some commonly used dialog boxes like the file open menu, message boxes, etc. It is just a sort of toolkit similar to qt or Gtk. We used it to develop the explorer and some other applications."
Once the xclass rewrite of FVWM95 is complete, there are still going to be more improvements added to the window manager. Citing the fact that non-experienced users have trouble installing FVWM95, Peraza hopes to be able to come up with a better way.
"We would like to have some kind of distribution package comprising not only the window manager, but also all the necessary modules together with the explorer, desktop manager and a suitable configuration utility," Peraza said.
The differences between FVWM95 and EPIwm are nothing short of dizzying, from their initial design to their final appearance and workflow. When looking at them together, it should make X users appreciate the incredible diversity available for their choice of GUI.