Woodsway Consulting, Inc.

FVWM is a virtual window manager for X11. It is extremely flexible and configurable, yet still reasonably light on resource demands. This makes it a good choice for use on MINIX.

Some say that the "F" in its name stands for "feline", as it is still lithe and quick after fifteen years of development. It has resisted well the excesses of "feeping creaturism", yet it is more featureful than most window managers. To get some idea of its capabilities, have a look at the Official FVWM Website .

This package is temporarily unavailable.
I have found that there are still some problems building it on a newly installed 3.1.3a system.
It turns out that I had forgotten about some of the changes I had made even to my "minimal" test system to make it fully usable.
As soon as I can document all the changes you need to make to your system I will put up a revised tarball and new instructions.

Configuration

FVWM configuration is a bit daunting at first. The huge number of options required to harness the tremendous power of this WM makes it very difficult to create a simple GUI configuration front-end; that is why there is none.

The best starting point for a new user is to copy someone else's configuration, study the documentation, and gradually customize it to suit your own taste. The Official FVWM Website has a number of links to helpful resources. Your eyes may glaze over after perusing the Desktop Screenshots page, so don't overlook the Links page. Other hints may be found through a bit of judicious googling.

When time permits, I would like to make a companion package of some extra sample configuration goodies not included in the standard distribution, so that the user's first exposure to FVWM will not be to the fairly bleak default look & feel of a bare bones system sans config files. This would include menus set up with applications that are actually likely to be installed on a MINIX system, and visual themes that are nice-looking but not so over-the-top that they would choke a MINIX system. That will probably need to be a separate package, designed to be installed in the user's home directory.

Release Candidate

This package is designated as a Release Candidate, because there are some things that don't yet work under MINIX. (The common thread in all of them appears to be "things that try to set up a full-duplex communication channel via pipes" - I will try to debug this as soon as I have time.)

Nevertheless, it is quite usable (I run it all the time) if you follow a few caveats.

Some things that don't work:

1. The PipeRead command.
2. The FvwmConsole Module.
3. The FvwmCommandS/FvwmCommand Module.
4. The FvwmTalk Module.
5. The Setup 95 script that appears on the default menu if you have no configuration files already installed.

This package will only build under MINIX 3.1.3a, and only with GCC.

Prerequisites:

1. You must install the showmem package. The build script uses it to check whether item 2 has been done correctly.
2. You must increase the stack+malloc size of /usr/gnu/bin/gld to 9 megabytes (9437184) with chmem before trying to build FVWM.
3. You must have the GNU grep and sed packages installed. These are a standard part of the 3.1.3a distribution, so if you didn't install all the packages when you installed your system, run packman or easypack and install the grep-2.5.1a and sed-3.02 packages (or whatever the most current versions are).

Instructions:

1. First download and install the showmem package, if you haven't done so. FVWM's build script needs it.
2. Next, make sure you have the GNU grep and sed packages installed. If you have them, you will have grep and sed binaries in /usr/local/bin . If either of these is missing, install the missing package(s).
3. Then download the FVWM package here.
4. Login as bin , or at least su to bin , to do the following steps. Really, you'll be much happier that way.
5. Unpack the tarball, enter the fvwm-2.5.25 directory, and read the README.minix file.
6. Run the build.minix script. The binary will be installed in /usr/local/bin ; the man pages will be installed in /usr/local/share/man/man1 (more details in README.minix ).
7. Run the " makewhatis /usr/local/share/man " command after the installation completes.

Download fvwm-2.5.24.minix-rc1.tar.bz2 (2468 KB)