Free Pascal Window Manager

History

The Free Pascal Window Manager was started in 2006 by Andrew Haines, Daniel Franzini and Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho. The main motivation for this project was to give a greater visibility for applications written in Free Pascal, which face difficulties to find adequate deployment in Linux because the Linux distributions prefer to deploy the standard programs which are packaged by each Window Manager, such as KDE or Gnome. FPWM should come as a simple, but easy to use Window Manager which also deploys a full set of useful applications. This set of applications is developed in the Free Pascal Application Suite project. Unfortunately, due to the lack of free time, lack of enough knowledge of X11 and the general difficulties in finding information about how to write a window manager, the project soon stalled.

In the second half of 2010 the University of São Paulo through Prof. Dr. Pedro Luiz Pizzigatti Corrêa has given it's support for the project by making a team of 4 students available to help in it's development for 1 semester as part of the engineering course in the university. This counts as executing a subject with 2 credits.

Guidelines

FPWM should be simples, light-weight and easy to use. It should be usable for both tablets / touch-screen devices and for normal desktop computers with a mouse. It should provide a taskbar similar to Windows, as well as icons in the desktop. It should have larger borders and larger icons in it's tablet mode, and a more common appearance in it's desktop mode. It should provide a system tray icon area and respect the Free Desktop specifications for Window Managers.

Subversion

 svn co https://fpwm.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/fpwm fpwm

Tutorials

Installing Linux in a virtual machine inside Windows

• First download Virtual PC: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=04d26402-3199-48a3-afa2-2dc0b40a73b6&DisplayLang=en

• Tutorial to install Linux in Virtual PC: http://www.pcreview.co.uk/articles/Windows/Run_Linux_in_Windows/

Configuring the login screen in Linux

Adding FPWM as a option in GDM

For debugging purposes one can add a file 99xterm.desktop to the folder /etc/X11/dm/Sessions

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=XTerm
Comment=XTerm
TryExec=xterm
Exec=/usr/share/X11/xdm/Xsession xterm
Icon=
Type=Application

Then use this terminal to start fpwm

Lap-Tupniquim project

This Window Manager might be utilized in the brazilian digital school desks of it proves to be good enough for it:

• Project Lap-Tupniquim: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvEv0aWo94Q

External links

• X11 Book: http://www.niksula.hut.fi/~jkirma/books/xlib.pdf
• http://tronche.com/gui/x/icccm/