JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

brymway · 2008-12-01 17:12:20

I'm posting this because there isn't one, at least as far as the searching capabilitys of my computer. I was using Openbox and liked it just fine. But I still wasn't the master of my own domain. JWM isn't in the list of environments at the beginners installation wiki page but a friend told me he used it and I saw this one thread so I planned to try and use it. So I downloaded it, switched over to jwm and copied fuscia's jwmrc and plopped it in my root directory. I've been adding to it, my programs and all but I've kept it and am studying it to become proficient at altering it.

So I hope the JWM users will contribute at least there jwmrc files and be available to field questions for the people who are curious about this truly lightweight environment. This is the thread that started me off running, thanks fuscia...

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=49103

And here is one by a friend, alienjeff...

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=56421

(thanks for the Arch tip AJ! I'm in heaven)

This wiki says that jwm is good for a nice windows98 look. *gag* That is completely false. Sure you can make it look like windows if you want but I think you can do that with all the desktop managers. My experience with jwm using puppy and dsl is anything but windows. It is very configurable.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Jwm

Last edited by brymway (2008-12-03 03:21:04)

fuscia · 2008-12-01 18:37:52

my pleasure.

brymway · 2008-12-02 04:02:41

When I started using JWM last night, I simply copied fuscias jwmrc, put it in my root directory, and started playing. It seems that fuscia was using thunar and I like pcmanfm, so I created a gtk file in my root directory and pcman was happy. I have my little button that opens up a menu that allows me to choose my programs. I can also right click on the desktop and open some pcman options. But, when I first log in, all I see is my wallpaper off center and too large and no (my desktop) icon on my desktop. Until, that is, I open my jwm menu with the little button and click pcmanfm. Then, the desktop comes up right. I didn't have this problem with openbox so I'm wondering which file I can alter to tell it to run pcmanfm when jwm comes up.

brymway · 2008-12-02 04:33:28

Have been reading this learning how to alter the jwmrc file to make it look and do what I like.
http://www.joewing.net/programs/jwm/config.shtml

fuscia · 2008-12-02 11:04:53

brymway, does pcman set your wallpaper? i used it once and had a bad experience with it. i now mostly use either mc, or thunar, and i use feh to set my wallpaper.

i can't believe this thread hasn't been stickied yet. i guess the rest of them are afraid.

brymway · 2008-12-02 16:58:42

Fuscia pray tell! I've never heard someone having a bad experience with pcman. Could you share and give us something to watch out for? I defined the path to my choice of wallpaper in my jwmrc. But I also have the wallpaper defined in pcman so when I first log in, I see my wallpaper thru jwm, then after I click pcman, it takes over as the "controller". That's what I'm trying to change. I use pcman because I use a hard drive partition for general storage and I couldn't figure out how to get thunar to show me the partitions and pcman did it automatically. I know, operator head space, but it works for me. I suppose if I know what to do instead, I'd change it.

I don't know what feh is. I'm relatively new to being able to choose what programs I want to use so I'm still finding out these new programs. I'll look at feh.

As for the lack of enthusiasm, I'm surprised as well. But time will tell. Maybe there are more than we think that use it. Then again, this thread just started and maybe people just need to see what it can do. That's my hope anyway.

brymway · 2008-12-02 23:52:01

Feh seems like it's the proper thing for the minimalist. I followed the archwiki to the letter. I got it to set the wallpaper, but it won't set it at startup according to the script that the wiki has. My wallpapers are in my ~/wallpaper dir. I even followed the one that past users have referenced to at the ubuntu forum but that doesn't work. Then I tried a combination of the two. No. It seems to me that our wiki forgot to mention something. I suspect that I should create a file and put it in my ~/ but I'm not smart enough yet to write scripts. How might one go about this?

brymway · 2008-12-03 02:04:24

As I was. Seems like now it wants to work just like the wiki presented it. I'm gonna play around with it and make sure it does before I confirm it personally.

Yes it works. I did exactly what the wiki said here
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Feh
and it works perfectly.

As for viewing jpg files in a directory, I'm working on that now.

So fuscia how do you handle mounting devices with Thunar?

Last edited by brymway (2008-12-03 02:57:52)

brymway · 2008-12-05 03:40:14

So to answer my own question about Thunar. In order to handle media and mountable devices, download thunar-volman. I'm still curious what happened with pcmanfm. So I'm making progress with learning the configs of jwm. I have my taskbar on the top of the desktop like I prefer it. I will have a look and compare it to the likes of dwm.

edit: uh never mind. No comparison.

Last edited by brymway (2008-12-06 03:41:46)

alienjeff · 2008-12-05 21:16:05

@brymway

How do? Glad to see you are getting on well with Arch. I was AFK the other day on IRC ... sorry I missed you!

@assembled multitude

My present issue with JWM is getting <Groups> to work. From what reading I've done of existing documentation, there's no reason why my set up shouldn't work ... but it doesn't. Here's the related section of my ~/.jwmrc-personal file:

<!-- Group settings -->

<Group>
    <Name>thunderbird</Name>
        <Option>desktop:1</Option>
</Group>

<Group>
    <Name>firefox</Name>
        <Option>desktop:2</Option>
</Group>    

<Group>
    <Name>geany</Name>
        <Option>desktop:3</Option>
</Group>

<Group>
    <Name>xchat</Name>
        <Option>desktop:5</Option>
</Group>

As you can deduce, my desire is for Thunderbird to always open in desktop 1; Firefox in desktop 2; Geany in desktop 3; and Xchat in desktop 5. With this configuration, the only ones that work as desired are Geany and Xchat.

What am I missing?

Last edited by alienjeff (2008-12-05 21:19:51)

brymway · 2008-12-06 03:40:35

Firefox and Thunderbird are the literal commands to open the app as understood by /usr/bin/?

alienjeff · 2008-12-06 03:58:31

Aye. To wit:

[jeff@kayak ~]$ whereis firefox
firefox: /usr/bin/firefox
[jeff@kayak ~]$ whereis thunderbird
thunderbird: /usr/bin/thunderbird

brymway · 2008-12-06 05:39:31

I'm not going to claim to be of any use to you as I am just a "cabinboy" but I will do some looking around and see if I can find any thing that speaks to your problem.

dolby · 2008-12-06 07:30:01

Nice configuration files... they remind me of xorg-server's input hotplugin files.......

adamlau · 2009-02-08 17:28:59

One of my boxes have trouble displaying icons when xorg sets the default color depth to 24. 16 works fine, curious as to why 24 would not display png and xpm icons...

Last edited by adamlau (2009-02-08 17:29:11)

adamlau · 2009-02-11 12:25:25

Made some changes to the JWM Wiki http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/JWM . Feel feel to expand and contribute

Last edited by adamlau (2009-02-11 12:25:44)

renuvio · 2009-02-11 23:26:28

Well done, thanks for expand the info in the wiki's entry.

patroclo7 · 2009-04-08 13:33:42

adamlau wrote:

One of my boxes have trouble displaying icons when xorg sets the default color depth to 24. 16 works fine, curious as to why 24 would not display png and xpm icons...

May I know if you happened to find the solution to this? I do not get png icons at 24 color depth. Do you know where the kwm upstream bugs should be reported? Sourceforge? Directly to the author?

alienjeff · 2009-07-12 17:31:09

Quite by accident I stumbled upon a fix for hotkey starting Thunderbird to open in virtual desktop #1 under JWM.

<Group>
    <Name>thunderbird-bin</Name>
    <Option>desktop:1</Option>
</Group>

This was by trial-and-error and not leet skillz. Sigh.

Still unable to get my Firefox hotkey to open the browser in virtual desktop #2, darn it! These are the configs I've tried so far:

<Group>
   <!-- didn't work <Name>/usr/lib/firefox-3.5/run-mozilla.sh</Name>
   <!-- didn't work <Name>/usr/lib/firefox-3.5/firefox</Name> -->
   <!-- didn't work <Class>firefox</Class> -->
   <!-- didn't work <Name>firefox</Name> -->
   <!-- didn't work <Name>firefox-bin</Name> -->
   <!-- didn't work <Class>firefox-bin</Class> -->
   <Option>desktop:2</Option>
</Group>

Any hints?

Last edited by alienjeff (2009-07-12 17:32:53)

reflets de vert · 2010-03-24 01:01:51

I don't know how to create a real desktop with icons, right click, etc...

I heard about pcmanfm...
I tried to use the .jwmrc to display a background photo (jwm uses 12 Mo lol photo too big. I tried with a smaller photo... less ram, but still no real desktop).

Now I prefer my black background with very low ram use.

When I start nautilus a real desktop appears. A fun fact.
It makes me think that it must exist several solutions.

Does a simple, lightweight and configurable solution exist?

Rumor · 2010-03-24 01:09:25

If you are going to use Nautilus, start it with

nautilus --no-desktop

mythus · 2010-03-24 13:35:23

Btw- if you want to run pcmanfm at startup with JWM and you don't use a dispaly manager (not sure if this works with a display manager...) Ismply put in ~/.xinitrc

exec pcmanfm &
exec jwm

You could also try the jwmrc starup command and see if that works for you...

<StartupCommand>pcmanfm &</StartupCommand>

As for grouping, are you certain that those are the actual call names for your desktops? Have you tried, for example, a capital D? I am not sure myself, I haven't fooled with that yet, but *shrugs* maybe it would work?

reflets de vert · 2010-03-24 13:55:48

I use slim and JWM.

I modified ~/.xinitrc. Pcmanfm starts, but says that there is GTK+ icon theme defined. I tried to copy the /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc in ~/ and it doesn't change.
I have a Desktop with "D"

Interesting manner to use nautilus.

I have a question: must I create a create a new post?

mythus · 2010-03-24 14:12:42

Did you set your gtk theme with a program such as lxappearance?

reflets de vert · 2010-03-24 14:33:53

No I didn't try it.

Thus, I installed it. There is still no real desktop, but pcmanfm starts without failure or error message.
I didn't set some background picture in jwmrc, but I tried, it's not so interesting.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-01 17:12:20

JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#2 2008-12-01 18:37:52

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#3 2008-12-02 04:02:41

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#4 2008-12-02 04:33:28

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#5 2008-12-02 11:04:53

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#6 2008-12-02 16:58:42

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#7 2008-12-02 23:52:01

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#8 2008-12-03 02:04:24

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#9 2008-12-05 03:40:14

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#10 2008-12-05 21:16:05

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#11 2008-12-06 03:40:35

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#12 2008-12-06 03:58:31

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#13 2008-12-06 05:39:31

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#14 2008-12-06 07:30:01

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#15 2009-02-08 17:28:59

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#16 2009-02-11 12:25:25

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#17 2009-02-11 23:26:28

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#18 2009-04-08 13:33:42

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#19 2009-07-12 17:31:09

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#20 2010-03-24 01:01:51

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#21 2010-03-24 01:09:25

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#22 2010-03-24 13:35:23

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#23 2010-03-24 13:55:48

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#24 2010-03-24 14:12:42

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

#25 2010-03-24 14:33:53

Re: JWM---info, blog, jwmrc's...whatever

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