Introduction

This guide helps you install and customise windowlab on ubuntu. Windowlab is a very small, simple, flexible and reliable window manager (wm). Unlike wms such as GNOME there are no icons, no desktop and no frills, just windows, which you may rearrange, open, close and give the focus to, allowing you to get on with whatever prompted you to start your computer in the first place. You might think of it as being 'one step up from X' but if you give it a try and get used to it, you may also find that it's a very productive environment. The background and motivation for windowlab is explained at [http://nickgravgaard.com/windowlab/]. If you want to decorate your desktop and have multiple screens etc, there are plenty of simple ways of doing that without installing lots of software you may never need. This a characteristically *NIX way of doing things (small, 'sharp' applications glued together).

Installation

Make sure you have gcc installed. Download the latest version of windowlab from [http://nickgravgaard.com/windowlab/] and type the following commands:

tar -xvf windowlab-XXX.tar 
cd windowlab-XXX
make
sudo make install

This will install windowlab to /usr/X11R6/bin/windowlab. Use the instructions in ["CustomXSession"] to make sure that you can use it, then create a .xinitrc file that ends with the line

exec windowlab

Configuration

You can set a background colour or image for your 'desktop' using xsetroot. Add something like this to your .xinitrc file:

xsetroot -cursor_name top_left_arrow -solid deepskyblue4

To display the date and time you could launch xclock from .xinitrc but that doesn't display the time in the window's title bar, so you need to focus the window before you can read it. There is a python xclock clone at [http://jim.sdf-eu.org/py/pyxclock] which does display the time in the title bar, so you could use that.

To use rhythmbox (the default ubuntu music app) you need to start ESD automatically (how?) or set gstreamer to use something other than ESD for output. Use gstreamer-properties to select ALSA or OSS etc.

When you start windowlab the menu is visible when right-clicking anywhere outside an active window. To select a menu option, release the mouse over it. You'll start out with the default menu, which lives at /etc/X11/windowlab/windowlab.menurc. To create your own, type:

mkdir ~/.windowlab
cp /etc/X11/windowlab/windowlab.menurc ~/.windowlab/

And start editing it, adding lines in the format

label:command

Use gksudo to launch apps that require su privileges, eg

network:gksudo network-admin

Many GUI applications support the standard X option geometry, allowing you to specify the initial size and position of the window, which is useful in windowlab because windows are otherwise created at the current mouse position.

It's quite easy to select 'quit' from the menu accidentally. To avoid this, install gmessage and create a script like this

# ~/bin/quit-windowlab.sh
gmessage -buttons Yes:0,No:1 Quit windowlab?
case $? in
  0) skill windowlab;;
  1) ;;
esac

Then change the 'quit' line in windowlab.menurc to

quit:~/bin/quit-windowlab.sh

CategoryDocumentation