Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

Since I broke out SliTaz on a regular basis I’ve been rather fond of Joe’s Window Manager. It’s exceedingly simple and terribly lightweight, which are two qualities I admire in a program.

Unfortunately, the Gutsy version of JWM is still stranded at 1.5. And since it’s always nice to be running the latest version, I figured I’d try and recompile it.

Fortunately, it’s about the easiest thing you could possibly want to compile. Here are the dependencies for you, as a command line.

sudo aptitude install build-essential checkinstall libx11-dev libxft-dev libxrender-dev libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev

There are some other dependencies you can include if, for example, you need Xinerama. I only included the stuff I thought critical. I also make a habit of using checkinstall, since it gives you a nifty deb package at the end.

After those are installed, download version 2.01 of JWM, and decompress it on your machine.

wget http://joewing.net/programs/jwm/releases/jwm-2.0.1.tar.bz2
tar -xvf jwm-2.0.1.tar.bz2

Change into the directory it makes, then run the configure script.

cd jwm-2.0.1
./configure

If your dependencies are in place, you should see a full column of options preset for you. Now compile.

make

When that’s done (it’ll take about 10 seconds — it’s that lightweight), run checkinstall.

sudo checkinstall

From there, you can adjust the package details as you like, and then checkinstall will install it for you.

Now set it as your window manager, either in your .xinitrc file or however you spawn your X session (I noticed it didn’t appear in the session options under GDM). Bingo! Just like magic.

Here’s a screeny, so you can see how marvelous it looks when it’s in place. …

Enjoy! 😉

P.S.: This was actually done on Gobuntu, but that shouldn’t make a difference.