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

I made a rather delightful discovery today, in the shape of an Ubuntu package called icewm-lite. Basically you get IceWM, with the subtraction of the taskbar and antialiasing, if I understand it right. In action, it looks like this.

Hey wow, look at that. It’s almost like a GTK1.2 Openbox. Pretty fast, too, although it’s hard to compare it to one or another on different distros.

I suppose on a very slow machine you might want this over Openbox, since it deflects the added video strain of refined graphics. Stick to GTK1.2 or FOX or maybe FLTK applications, and you might be able to work a graphical environment on a machine that’s otherwise stuck with console applications.

Too bad I didn’t know about that when I was working with Turbo, or this machine. Then again, there’s a lot I’ve learned since then. … 😉

P.S.: Just for future reference, that’s the TrueCurve theme with the non-xft option fixed to use non-Microsoft core fonts, using the LighthouseBlue theme for GTK1.2 from the Hardy repos. Actually, I prefer the Mist engine, since the Lighthouse one is sometimes skittish. I modified the systemwide font size setting (it’s at /etc/gtk/gtkrc.utf-8) so I don’t get such obnoxious menu bars. And here’s the Openbox-esque menu setting, in case you want it:

prog    "Terminal emulator"     xterm           x-terminal-emulator -ls
prog    "Web browser"           mozilla         x-www-browser
prog    "E-mail client"         sylpheed-gtk1   sylpheed-gtk1
prog    "File manager"          emelfm          emelfm
separator
menu    Applications    folder {
       menu    Accessories     folder  {
               prog    emelFM          emelfm          emelfm
               prog    Ghostview       gv              gv
               prog    NEdit           nedit           nedit
               }
       menu    Graphics        folder  {
               prog    xzgv            xzgv            xzgv
               }
       menu    Multimedia      folder  {
               prog    XMMS            xmms            xmms
               }
       menu    Network         folder  {
               prog    Dillo           dillo           dillo
               prog    Sylpheed        sylpheed-gtk1   sylpheed-gtk1
               }
       menu    System          folder  {
               prog    xterm           xterm           xterm
               prog    "Take screenshot"       screenshot      scrot -q 100 -d 1 screenshot-%F-%H%M%S-.jpg
               menu    "X Utilities"   folder  {
                       prog    xcalc   xcalc   xcalc
                       prog    xfm     xfm     xfm
                       prog    xpaint  xpaint  xpaint
                       prog    xpdf    xpdf    xpdf
                       }
               }
}
menu    Scripts         folder  {
       prog    Mute            mute    /home/kmandla/.scripts/mute.sh
       prog    "Reset volumes" reset   /home/kmandla/.scripts/volumes.sh
       }
separator

Have fun! 😉