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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

I have been unable to compile ratpoison.  The later version 1.3.0
complains that my C compiler is not 'sane'.  The earliest version 0.0.5 
(at the ratpoison home page) needed some files from xbin.tgz and xprog.tgz 
which I don't have room to install on my 170M hard drive where I got the 
compiler to work again.  But I do at least have ar working there now, 
which is needed to unpack .deb binaries.

The Debian archives site for older versions has been inaccessible for a 
while.  SW71 seems to correspond to Debian potato 2.2 (glibc2.1, kernel 
2.2).  The current stable Debian is woody (glibc2.2, kernel 2.2 or 2.4).  
It is readily available but I had trouble finding where to download and 
eventually just searched on the file name after viewing packages.

ar -x filename.deb produces three files of which data.tar.gz contains the 
program and the rest is debian stuff which I deleted.

I unpackaged the package with tar -zxvf and repackaged it with Slackare 
makepkg and then copied it to my main linux partition and rebooted and 
installed it there. 

You can try it yourself:  
http://www.iamjlamb.com/~keesan/ratpoison-100-deb.tgz

53K executable and some documentation and examples

I did not read the documentation but when it told me it could not find 
x-terminal-emulator and therefore could not make me an xterminal emulator, 
I made a script called x-terminal-emulator in /usr/sbin with the one line 
rxvt
(no /bin/sh needed) 
and now I can make rxvt's  (Ctrl-t, c)
C-t,s   horizontal split screen
C-t,S  vertial split screen
C-t,?  help screen

I replaced the contents of .xinitrc with
ratpoison &rxvt

and I was then able to type 
xinit -- /usr/X11R6/bin/Xvesa -screen 800x600x15
(I made an alias for this and a few other resolutions and color depths)
which put me into an rxvt where I could type Opera.
Opera complained about locales (Xvesa does not support that)
and then something about not liking the Window but it did load.

I could install xinit (10K from xbin) but xinit requires not only the
dependencies needed by Opera (libSM, libICE,libXext) but also libXmu
(343K) and libXt (110K) I am trying to find some way to manage without
xinit and just type ratpoison and rxvt on the command line -- any ideas?

Ratpoison is a small window manager which does not require a mouse and 
does everything with keystrokes, like the console program 'screen'.
I have not really tried it out yet so don't know if it will let me switch 
focus with Alt-Tab while in Opera.