running X

[mnbonehead]

hey all

New to Linux, used to do some Unix stuff 6 years ago. Installed
Mandrake 9.0 on an old pc (12o Mhz Pentium, 64MB RAM) with
no problems.

I boot to the console by default, and can run KDE with no problems.

What I want to do is start X, and run one application, say mozilla or Konqueror, in order to web browse without the overhead of
the KDE desktop.

How do I do this?

If i type "X" at the Console I get the background and the "X" cursor, but I don't know how to launch an app...even a simple Xterm

Thanks.

[yosarian]

It sounds like you're booting X into TWM. If you right click and hold the button down, you should get a menu. Once you select an app, you'll get an outline of window that you can drag and anchor on the desktop. That should do the trick for ya.

Although you may want to install a different lightweight window manager as I found placing and anchoring the windows in TWM tedious. MDK 9.0 has several options for small footprint wm's. Check out Icewm-lite, or Blackbox, both of which should be on your CDs.

Open Mandrake Control Center, click on software, then install software. Click list all packages alphabetically and they should be listed.

HTH

[GaryJones32]

you might be a rare cantidate for a window manager named wmx...
it's way small and simple and elegant..
you start up other wm's with a .xinitrc file in your home dir
or use other files looked for by startx
you can "which startx"
read your startx to find your system wide xinitrc
copy it into your home dir
remane with a dot in front and change it to run whatever wm you like

[mnbonehead]

Thanks for the help.

What I did was run xinitrc /usr/X11R6/bin/starticewm from init level 3 and that worked.

Then I decided to uninstall gnome and kde
and that no longer worked, but
xinit /usr/X11R6/bin/starticewm did.

I will look at the startx stuff, I vaguely remeber the .xinitrc stuff.

Thanks to both of you for the help.

[masinger53]

The small footprint wmx mentioned earlier in this thread sounds very interesting. Could you give me more info on that?
I'm currently running RH 7.3, with Gnome login and sawfish window manager.
On my dual boot 900 mhz system with 512mb RAM and GeForce2 32mb, it's a tad sluggish.
And no, I haven't tuned hdparm at all . . .