Aug 12 2007
The Fluxbox window manager.
Fluxbox is a very lean X Window manager based on Blackbox for Unix-like operating systems –Linux, BSD, Solaris.
Because of its light weight it needs very little memory, loads very quickly and works very fast.
Desktop environments based upon Fluxbox are usually very simple, almost minimalistic. They feature little more than a taskbar with no menus –the system and apps menu is avilable by right clicking your mouse on the desktop. Configuration settings are stored in text files. That same lightness allows this manager to run with very little resources thus enabling very old systems to run a fully featured GUI.
Eye candy is not the main point in Fluxbox but you can have it by adding IDesk or ROX desktop to your system. However, real window transparency is fully supported and makes for very practical and usable themes.
Becaus of its very light weight Fluxbox is the window manager of choice for many mini distros aiming to maximum portability (such as Damn Small Linux), specialized distros (Gparted LiveCD, Backtrack2) in which resources are needed to perform tasks other than please the eye, full featured distros that need or want to run in old computers as well as new ones (Fluxbuntu) or those for the maximum responiveness loving crowd.
