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Getting Rid of CDE and Using Different Window Managers on a SUN Ultra Workstation

Solaris 2.8 ships with CDE - which I personally find extremely annoying. So one of the first chores I do, when setting up a new UNIX environment on a SUN workstation, is to get rid of CDE and replace it with a window manager I feel more comfortable with.. For me that is the "good old" Fvwm - it's lean and supports multiple virtual screens per display / frame buffer - and does not eat up my valuable screen real estate..

NEW FVWM:

Fvwm 2.5.7 is available as a pre-release version! Checkout the Fvwm 2.5.7 features! e.g. it supports:

Full Enhanced Window Manager Hints support
Powerful WindowShade in all directions, including diagonal (makes windows "roll-up" like on a Mac)
New module FvwmPerl to enable scripting in rc files
.. and much more!

HOWTO Replace CDE

To replace CDE with ANY window manager of your choice..

make sure that the window manager of your choice is installed correctly and make a note of it where the executable is..
e.g. /usr/local/bin/fvwm

add the following lines to your .Xdefaults file:

! DO NOT USE CDE window manager, but start fvwm !
!
Dtsession*wmStartupCommand: /usr/local/bin/fvwm

Note that the exclamation mark ! is the comment character in the .Xdefaults file.

Now you need to cp /usr/dt/config/Xconfig /etc/dt/config/Xconfig and uncomment the line Dtlogin*xdmMode: True.

With this modification, the dtlogin process will source each users .xsession file if that file is executable(!) - make sure it is! See man dtlogin. Here is a sample .xsession file - rename it to .xsession before use. Here are two .fvwmrc files which work fine for me - one uses the built-in pager, the other one uses the external pager. Remove the suffix .sun* before use! btw. the HELP key brings windows to the front or to the back.

Here are some Fvwm screen shots large , small - no wasteful menu bars, but 9 virtual screens :-)

And here is a gzipped tar file with Fvwm 1.24 for Solaris 2.6 and higher Just cd to the location where you want to install Fvwm (e.g.: cd /usr/local/, and the untar the libraries there locally gtar -zxvf fvwm_1.24_sol2.6+.tgz .

# md5sum fvwm_1.24_sol2.6+.tgz
ad24bb8602963208b95fa056776698a8  fvwm_1.24_sol2.6+.tgz

The executable works fine under Solaris 2.8 .. and I beleive it should also work under 2.5.1 - have fun!

Getting Rid of CDE and Using Different Window Managers on a SUN Ultra Workstation

NEW FVWM:

HOWTO Replace CDE

See also: Using Multiple Monitors / Frame Buffers

See also: Getting higher resolutions on a SUN Ultra Workstation