Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:

Regarding the use of Opera with Xvesa and no window manager:

The blinking was caused by loading multiple blank pages, which I found out
by loading opera with icewm, which shows what is in each window (lots of
blank pages).  I deleted all these pages and things are fine now.

Icewm is 285K and can be put into /usr/X11R6/bin and used with no
additional files, if you don't want themes (you get three little black
boxes instead of the icons for minimize, maximize, and delete),
backgrounds (plain black color), icons (even in Opera), a menu, or an
indication of memory usage.  It still shows you a list of what is running
in which windows and lets you shift focus between windows or maximize (to
full screen or vertically which in Opera becomes horizontal split screen
instead).

I also added the help files.

Icewm has the same dependencies as Opera (a few xbin libraries).

I don't even need xinit or .xinitrc unless I want to modify the keyboard 
with xmodmap and not type it in manually in an rxvt, or can xmodmap be 
added to an alias?  

alias o='Xvesa -screen 1024x768x16 &rxvt -e icewm &rxvt -e opera'

I have a total of 1.8M of files to run X, just add Xvesa and whatever
fonts you want.  A few fixed fonts (misc, probably what Steven chose for
Bl3) and one set of truetype fonts ought to do it, such as Lucida or
Helvetica, but would just 100dpi do it or are 75dpi also needed?  Does
anyone want me to package this all and post it for BL2 as minibl2x.tgz?  
Without xinit and dependencies it would be a few 100K smaller.  You might
need a few additional libraries to run other X programs but not for xv or
xpdf.  You can also manage with just the Xvesa fonts if your eyes are 
good.  Xvesa adds about 1M executable.  This all might be helpful if you 
have a very small BL2 partition but more RAM than needed by BL3.

Let me know whether to package this and post it.  

> There are other problems though.  Every time I load Opera it blinks a few 
> times.  Each time I load it it blinks more times.  It is now up to 15 
> times.  When I load it without being online, it loads several copies of 
> the screen, one more each time which might be related to the blinking.
> But the number of blinks is higher than the number of copies.
> Once it is loaded, it works okay.
> > 
> If I don't use icewm (some other window manager, or no window manager),
> there seems to be no way to switch focus to where I want it without using
> the mouse.  Icewm also uses the keyboard (Alt-F10) to maximize the opera
> window, but ratpoison automatically runs everything full screen.  I might
> try to install a really minimal icewm without any menus, icons, or themes.

That was easy!