moving parts of the kasper clan

kay! So here’s the part where I show you some examples of what my working environment looks like. =:) Mind you, these aren’t all THAT exciting, and are intended only to give you an example of the flexibility that you have in running FreeBSD/Linux/UNIX/anything other than Microsoft’s Windows (sometimes) Operating Systems. I say “(sometimes)” because they are as a general rule SO horribly unstable compared to FreeBSD/Linux/UNIX. Anyhoo, enough talking… here’s the pic’s. Feel free to click on the images and up will pop a new window with the full-sized graphic (1024×768)….

Let’s see…. In this shot, I’m

• developing the banner for my site in gimp
• while running artwiz’s “cliche” theme for blackbox.
• And look, there’s my mutt e-mail client (VERY well-done program).
• I’m running blackbox version 0.60.3 in this shot, and you can also see my bbkeys program running, and Pax’s bbpal running (the friendly little blinking turtle). =:)
• Oh–also, you can see Bill Wilson’s gkrellm system monitor (also an extremely well-written program)–and it’s completely themeable as well!! =:)
• Like I said, nothing extraordinary, but the graphics are great, the speed is great, and the stability is the best I’ve ever seen….

Alrighty. Nothing exciting whatsoever going on in this screenshot, in fact, it’s *gasp* a different window manager!!!

• Here I’m running the sawfish window manager with I don’t remember which theme.
• Also running is the gkrellm systems monitor that I mentioned above, gimp, and the gnome thingey-majigger on the bottom of the screen. I believe they call it the “panel”, which is sort of like Windows’s task-bar launcher and menu. Actually, I think I’ve only used sawfish maybe three times. =:) It’s pretty well-done, and it integrates very nicely with gnome’s desktop environment.

I guess my main issue is that I’ve only got a Pentium II-300 mhz machine with 64 megs of RAM (no, I can’t get more), and blackbox is just SOOOO much faster and more responsive than ANYTHING else I’ve ever used that I just always keep coming back. =:) Kudos, by the way, to Brad for the blackbox window manager–it is as near perfection as I can imagine. =:)

Well, anyway, back in the days of hanging on on undernet’s #linux for far too many hours every day, Brad Hughes (who I used to know as nyztihke, and now goes by nyz) showed me some interesting code he was playing with–hand-writing his own window manager from scratch. At the time, you had to manually edit .Xdefaults and restart his code any time you wanted to change something. =:) Anyway, I was still so enthralled with all the neato options that the seemingly countless number of window managers for X offered, that I was switching window managers about twice a week. At the time, I bounced back and forth between AfterStep, that raster kid’s enlightenment window manager, the Ice window manager (icewm), Alfredo Kojima’s window maker, and fvwm 2. I did some theme-type stuff and it was decent, but nothing you’d want to write home about.

Nowadays, however, either I’m turning into an old goober and don’t care as much about changing the way my desktop looks every day… or (and I lend more credibility to the second theory than the first), I’ve finally found a window manager and X environment that I really, really like. =:) Today, I use Brad Hughes’s blackbox window manager. I’ll let you click on the link yourself to look at it yourself, but it is extremely well-written, in C++, from scratch, and it is VERY fast. There are many good themes for the blackbox window manager, but in my opinion, the best theme-maker for blackbox (and one of the most talented artists that I’ve ever had the pleasure of getting to know) is artwiz (Youngjin Hahn). Go check out his site, you’re in for a REAL treat. There are also some really great applications that have been written explicitly to take advantage of blackbox’s internal image classes (which are, did I already say it, VERY well-done and fast), and you can find many of them at John Kennis’s bbtools site. I’ve also written a few applications myself for blackbox that have been pretty well-received and you can find them on this here site on my bbkeys page and my miscellany code page….

Now, I absolutely recommend blackbox to anybody (and have converted several very skeptical individuals to blackbox’s simplicity, power, and speed)…. But I also realize that it’s not for everybody. =:) And again, this is a Good Thing ™, because as I said before, there are TONS of choices in the window manager department. There are also a couple of completely integrated window environments that can look, feel, and act very similar to the Windows (TM) operating systems. Check out the KDE site, and the GNOME project. They’re both very well-done–and they’re constantly getting better.

Okay. I’ve just gotta say it. I am VERY impressed with vmware3. =:)

For my work, there are certain things for which I simply have to use the below-discussed Micro$oft Operating (?) Systems. And I’ll be danged if I’m actually going to have to work inside the thing. That I simply can’t stand. I can’t explain it. Write it off to another one of those nutty UNIX geek things or paranoia or something. But I can’t stand being forced to work completely inside the confines of anything Microsoft dishes out.

Anyway. So along comes the question… how do you do that? Especially when your job says that you have to work with Windoze. Well, you find an emulator that lets you do whatever you want, wherever you want. =:)

For the last year or so, I’ve not needed much more than the basic Windoze apps for my work. You know, like Dreamweaver, Photoshop, TopStyle Lite, Flash, Office, Oracle for Windoze, Acrobat, etc., etc. And for these simple apps, there’s a VERY good emulator that lets you run virtually any application for Windows95/98 inside Linux. It’s called Win4Lin. Since October 30, 2000, I’ve been using it, and like I said, it’s EXTREMELY good. The only hiccup I’ve hit recently is that I’m now needing to develop applications for my job for the win2000/winxp environment–and I need to do this from a win2000 or winxp environment. Well, this is not what Win4Lin is intended for. Win4Lin lets you run Windows apps in Linux. It does it well–it’s quite honestly the best thing there is for the majority of people needing to do this. It costs around 1/4th as much as vmware–and that’s not a fair comparison, really, it’s not, because vmware is a totally different animal.

So, long story short, if you’re needing to run Windows applications in Linux, go with Win4Lin. I am still extremely happy with them.

However, there are times when you need more than that. And for that, there’s vmware.

I won’t go into the gory details of what vmware is–go check out their site on your own. They obviously would do a much better job of it anyway. But briefly, vmware allows you to run an entirely separate machine (and as many of them as you want) inside an existing machine. And inside that/those machine/machines, you can run just about any Intel-based operating system that you desire. So, in my PIII 700 laptop with 256 megs of RAM, I run my real operating system (debian). Then, I have 3 virtual machines that exist on my debian-based linux filesystem (XFS of course). I could have more if I wanted, but 3’s all I need. And inside those 3 virtual machines, I have win2000, redhat 6.2, and Mandrake 8.1 running.

And it’s FAST!!!! =:)

I’ve played around with vmware1 and vmware2 before. And they’ve both been very slow. But vmware3 is incredible. I kid you not–my little PIII 700 laptop with 256 megs of RAM runs debian linux natively on the XFS filesystem. And I have oodles of things going on with it, including Oracle instances, Apache web servers running, and other neato stuff. And then I bring up my vmware/win2000 instance inside my X session and the responsiveness that it offers rivals a “real” machine running win2000 natively.

Love it. =:)