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The Linux distillery The joy of X - master the Linux GUI
The Linux distillery The joy of X - master the Linux GUI | The joy of X - master the Linux GUI |
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| The Linux distillery - The Linux user and switcher blog | |
| by David M Williams | |
| Sunday, 12 October 2008 | |
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Page 5 of 5 Under GNOME, the default file browsing environment is called Nautilus. I know this in a roundabout way and you can confirm it for yourself. Nautilus is akin to Windows Explorer, being a file manager that gives you a view of your file system and provides disk and file icons and handling.Featured Whitepaper
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If that file does not exist, it will use the system default at /usr/share/gnome/default.session. Open that file with a text editor and you will see the last line invokes the Nautilus command, passing some parameters. Nautilus is being launched by GNOME to manage disks and files and folders. Linux offers many alternatives we could use instead, specifically different window managers. Each has a distinct look and feel. A long-term popular window manager is TWM, for Tom’s Window Manager. We can instruct GNOME to use this instead of Nautilus. Check to see if you have a session file in your .gnome2 folder. If not, copy the system default like so cp /usr/share/gnome/default.session ~/.gnome2/session Now edit it; change the line which reads 3,RestartCommand=nautilus --no-default-window --sm-client-id default3 so it instead says 3,RestartCommand=twm Save your modifications. Logout (or kill X by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Backspace) and then log back in again. You’ll notice a difference immediately. Before any menus appear, your cursor shows with a window outline stuck to it. Drop this anywhere and then again. These two windows dock themselves to the top and bottom of the screen respectively, and have simple captions “Top Panel” and “Bottom Panel.” Start a program from the menu bars, like Firefox or anything else you are familiar with. You’ll see a similar behaviour; you have a window outline stuck to your pointer. Drop it anywhere you like and the program will launch. It will work just like normal – but you can clearly see the traditional title bar and window icons are now different. They are a different colour, perhaps a different font, and most definitely the close, minimise and maximise buttons are replaced with different buttons. Click the circle button in the top left corner of the window; this iconifies the program on your desktop. Click the icon and your running program resumes. Click on the desktop and you’ll also find a menu that never existed before, which will let you resize, kill, iconify and perform other operations on your desktop windows. This is the TWM window manager. The reason it needs you to drop windows and the reason the top and bottom panels are so bland is simply because we have no configuration file for it. If we got serious with TWM we could make a config file and then it would be much more aesthetic. You can find a load of information on different window managers that are available, including screenshots, online. With what you know you can easily install any different window manager and make it take effect just like we did with TWM. Hopefully I’ve whetted your appetite as to the possibilities available. You can really see the amazing power and flexibility of Linux that no matter how you received it, you ultimately have massive control over how it will look and run. You will also have a deeper understanding of the X-Windows system that Linux uses and how it relates to the terms more-often heard terms GNOME and KDE. Next time I’ll build on this with two more interesting examples - specifically, how to make your Linux computer look like a Windows PC or a Macintosh! |
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