WindowMaker on FreeBSD

WindowMaker on FreeBSD

This weekend I decided it was time to upgrade the software on the two functional Sun Sparc systems I have. I have FreeBSD on the newer of the two machines, and had been trying various window managers to use. The older Sparc has FVWM (recently upgraded to the latest version) on it so whilst it is really my favourite for reasons of nostalgia, I felt I’d like something different. I had tried XFce, but many features of it were broken on the FreeBSD/Sparc64 platform. So I installed a few other window managers to see what they were like.

I had never installed WindowMaker before but had certainly heard of it. I remember looking through many package lists to see many of the dock apps, and wondering about the window manager itself. WindowMaker has a similar style to the old NeXT workstations operating system called NeXTStep the system that would eventually become mac OSX.

The first thing I noticed when I fired it up was how minimalist it appeared to be. I found the root menu relatively quickly and managed to work out most of how it works within a few hours. I was quite impressed with how fast the interface responded when I clicked on items, although FVWM is a slight bit faster but not by much. There is a very nifty configuration program built-in that controls pretty much everything you could want to change. This makes it very newb friendly, I was able to set up my desktop the way I wanted it very quickly.

It isn’t the most pretty of window managers however, and there is no pager built-in. Workspaces are managed by the clip icon, usually at the top left of the screen. When using it via X on the local network it was quite fast, but over a VPN or SSH connection it became quite sluggish when FVWM maintains reasonable speed. I’ve heard that it can get slow if you have a large number of dock apps running.

Overall I quite like WindowMaker, whilst it isn’t a replacement for FVWM for me, it will be a nifty interface for my newer sparc machine. I like that I can configure most things with the user interface, and the large number of dock apps available for it. It isn’t so useful when I’m connecting into my machine externally however as the speed drops of significantly. It’s available on all the different distributions and the various BSD systems.