3 ways to turbocharge your Linux desktop

[ganeshbala]

3 ways to turbocharge your Linux desktop

Manufacturers and PC vendors would have you believe that there's only one way to speed up your machine: buy new kit.

And then, in 18 months, buy new kit again. However, it's usually our software that's the real bottleneck.

If you've been using Linux for a while, you'll already have discovered lighter alternatives to some of the platform's bloatfests – for example, using AbiWord and Gnumeric in the place of OpenOffice.org.

But what about the desktop itself? To start with, let's look at how the layers of the Linux GUI fit together.

That's the setup when you're running one of the big three desktops (Gnome, KDE, Xfce). However, if you choose a standalone window manager (WM), you can cut out the first and third layers in this stack. A window manager tends to incorporate all desktop functionality into a single executable that doesn't have additional programs such as file managers.

Also, most standalone window managers don't rely on a widget toolkit, instead rendering their own graphics and interfacing directly with the X Window System libraries. This helps to keep their RAM consumption to a minimum.

We're using Ubuntu 8.10 for this article, and we'll show you the commands you'll need to install three great WMs via the internet. Click Applications > Accessories > Terminal (in Gnome) to enter the commands. Then, after installing, log out and click Options > Select Session to choose the WM that runs when you log in. Let's go!

1. Fluxbox

    * Raw speed and low dependencies, free up screen space
    * www.fluxbox.org
    * Install on Ubuntu sudo apt-get install fluxbox fluxconf

When you first start Fluxbox, you'll probably be scratching your head and pondering: is this it? Well, that's the idea: Fluxbox wants to give your screen real estate back to you. It may look a bit daunting at first, but give it some time and you'll learn to love it.

Straight away you'll notice that there's no program menu to click like the K button in KDE or Applications in Gnome. However, you can bring up a similar type of menu by rightclicking anywhere on the desktop. This menu contains submenus for different program categories, and you can drag it around your desktop by clicking on the bar at the top. To get rid of the menu completely, just right-click on the menu's top bar.

Now let's turn our attention to the panel at the bottom of the screen, known as the Toolbar. It's very thin compared with the KDE panel and stretches across only two-thirds of the screen's width. On the left, you'll see the word 'one': this displays the current virtual desktop, so click the arrows to the right of the word to switch desktops.

Take me to task

After this, you'll see a task bar implementation. It's much the same as in Gnome, KDE and Xfce: programs are displayed along with their icons, and you can right-click on a program's entry to 'sticky' the window (that is, make it visible on all virtual desktops) and perform other operations.

To the right of the task bar area you'll see another pair of arrows, which enable you to cycle through currently running programs. Lastly, there's a clock. You can configure the behaviour of the toolbar by right-clicking in a nontask bar area. This brings up a menu which sets the toolbar's position, width (left-click to shrink it and right-click to grow it) and whether it should auto-hide.

[ganeshbala]

Focus Model This changes whether you select windows by clicking them, or by hovering over them with the mouse.

Tabs Options By unchecking the Tabs In Titlebar option, each window will have a small tab above its title bar, making it easy to group windows together.

Opaque Window Moving By default, Fluxbox draws only the outline of a window when you move it. Ticking this option displays the contents when moving, but causes a small loss in performance.

Further fine-tuning

Under Applications > Tools you'll see Fluxconf and Fluxkeys, two extra configuration tools. The former has many overlaps with the Configuration submenu, but if there's something you want to change about the desktop, look here. The latter is handy for redefining the keybindings for closing windows, switching desktops and so on.

Now you're well prepared to give Fluxbox a serious go. It may take you a few hours to get comfortable with it, so we recommend giving it a couple of days to let the simplicity and speed boosts soak in. Oh, and if you get bored with the default theme, see Styles in the desktop menu for more.

2. Ratpoison

    * Eliminate the mouse and save screen space
    * www.nongnu.org/ratpoison
    * Install on Ubuntu sudo apt-get install ratpoison

The mouse is a pretty clumsy input device. Sure, it's served us fairly well over the years, but it's a common source of RSI problems, and you have to keep reaching over to grab it when you're typing.

For web browsing and graphics editing tasks, the mouse isn't a hindrance – chances are you keep one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse. But what about when you're editing documents or programming? Just to hit a menu entry (if you don't know the keyboard shortcut) you have to reach over and grasp that increasingly annoying rodent.

Ratpoison, as the name suggests, is designed to terminate the mouse's job in window management. You won't find title bars for dragging windows, resize handles or any of the other bits you'd expect in a traditional window manager here.

The goal is that every window management operation you'd expect to perform in a normal setting should be achievable using the keyboard alone, so that if you're working on documents and/or programming, your hands never have to leave the keyboard as you're working.

There's another side to Ratpoison too, called tiling. With our regular window managers, we spend a lot of time juggling windows, making them maximised to use the whole screen or trying to align them with minimal overlap so that we can see two programs at once. Even with snap-to-edge placement, it's a scrappy and time-consuming job.

What tiler?

Ratpoison ignores all of this with its tiling system. This automatically places and resizes windows on the screen with no overlap, making sure as much screen space as possible is used.

This is a bit hard to describe purely textually, so fire up the window manager and we'll guide you through. (Note: Ubuntu doesn't present a Ratpoison option in the Select Session menu at the login screen. To run it, choose Failsafe Terminal and enter ratpoison when the prompt appears.)

When Ratpoison starts, you'll see either a blank screen or a terminal window that's the full size of the screen. With no title bars, panels, menus nor anything else to tempt your clicking fingers, it looks completely impossible to use.