I recently needed to replace twm as the window manager I used under VNC. I wanted something light so I looked at: blackbox, fluxbox, and flwm. These window managers have been around for some time and are probably available as binary packages for most distributions.
I went with blackbox after installing them all. To change what window manager starts when vnc starts you need to edit the xstartup file in your ~/.vnc directory. To start with it will look something like:
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
xterm -geometry 80×24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
twm &
To start blackbox instead of twm you change it to:
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
xterm -geometry 80×24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
blackbox &
You can remove some of the extra stuff started by the script if you want so that it looks like:
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
blackbox &
Now enjoy your new window manager.
Tags: window manager, linux, desktop
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[...] I tried the instructions on a fedora core 5 box and found that vnc2swf requires tkinter and pygame be installed but they are both packages that are easy to install with yum. You will also need some type of vnc server running on your box. If you want to do a screencast of your current desktop you will need to use x11vnc. It will allow you to let a vnc viewer connect to your current desktop. I found that using x11vnc didn't work that well. I'm not sure if it was the desktop I was using or what but the screencasts came out very choppy and for the most part unusable. I switched to using vncserver with a lightweight window manager and that fixed the issue. I think I like doing that better anyway because it gives me a fresh desktop to work from without all the normal extras. When you are doing a screencast it probably makes more sense to have less to look at anyway. [...]