Mutant Turkey Talk

jwm enhanced / fan fun.

Joe’s window manager has been around for quite a while. It has been included in alot of minimal distros like Damn Small Linux. I always liked that it was night and light, but never used it much, but my thirst for knowledge led me to rediscovering this great window manager.

It all started when I decided two computers downstairs would be nice, especially in the summer when my room is hot. I began working on a tower I recently aquired from my buddy. It was nothing special, a 1.7ghz AMD Athlon XP 2100+, but a heck of alot better than my current machine a 1.4ghz AMD Athlon. It was all going well, I had my gfx card in, my cruddy 20gig Western Digital. a Dlink wireless card and some standard PSU I pulled out from my closet.

*whir click beep boop errrr whirl*

And my machine was booting up. after about five minutes it shut down. and then after a second attempt it shutdown and a third time it happened. I opened up the box to make sure all the plugs were in right. My hand brush up against the Heatsink and pain shot up my arm! “Ouch!”. The CPU fan wasn’t spinning. in fact none of my fans were spinning! I was surprised it lasted even that long. It wasen’t the fans. it was the motherboard.

My work around was to hook up my fans to the power cables, bypassing the motherboard. after alot of sparks and a couple broken fans It all started working. the next test was to get the OS up and running. I was looking to make my Ubuntu lean and mean, and so I did the regular cleanup but this time I decided to go with Joe’s Window Manager. which I had first used on my Damn Small Linux laptops.

I did some research and found a great thread on the Puppy Linux forums for cool JWM themes and on the fifth or six page of reading, I saw a post a guy made about how he had modified JWM, and eventually made Joe’s Window Manager Enhanced. It still follows JWM’s rc file and uses almost all the same code. it just adds and updated look to it instead of the old block look, and adds transparency if you want it along with the ability to change your window button images. It also fixed many of the bugs associated with the Original JWM.

Here’s a shot of the new and the old.

You can make it look really nice. add a system tray at the bottem and a clock, a start menu if you want. add desktop support with iDesk or pcmanfm and BAM your jwm looks as nice as any heavy weight window manager or environment,