- Why this document?
I wrote this document, because I ran into troubles when I tried to install AfterStep on an old mashine that only runs with an X server with 8bpp color depth in a satisfying resolution. I skipped it some times and checked out various other windowmanagers, but in my opinion not one of them reaches the qualities of AfterStep. I also searched around in the internet, but since Kiwi's page doesn't exist anymore, I didn't find any useful hints or even low-color icons. - Why not more than 8bpp?
In my special case, that computer was build out of old bits and pieces lying around. It was a mainboard with a VLB system, and you hardly get a new graphic board for it. Also I didn't want to spend any more money in it. - What's so bad with the other windowmanagers?
Nothing. But here are some disadvantages of other windowmanagers I tested:
Fvwm2: with only 8bpp it looks a little bit boring, I like the AS handling much more then that of Fvwm2.
WindowMaker: You don't really want that on 8bpp ;-) WindowMaker only looks good with much colors or on greyscale.
BlackBox: Same as WindowMaker.
OLVWM: hey, that one starts smelling bad and isn't my thing.
KDE: as I said it is an old mashine, and I don't want to spend any bucks for it. KDE uses lots of memory and is quite slow. Also I don't like the look and the feel of it very much. But it works well with only 8bpp, the icon sets uses very few colors.
Gnome: Gnome doesn't come with an own windowmanager, so you would need another one.
Icewm: that one would work fine with 8bpp, but I like AS much more.
Ctwm: would work with 8bpp but I don't like it.
Enlightenment: just kidding ;-)
I made the experience, that I can choose between two possibilities to make AS work with 8bpp:
- You can reduce the colors of all used icons and edit the pixmaps so that they would all use the same few colors. Use wharf and the buttons with only one color, no gradients. That's a lot of work, because choosing the same colors for all icons seems to be difficult. Also the icons would look poor. I know, there are icons for 8bpp but if you use asclock and about 10 other icons, all 256 colors are taken by the windowmanager and that doesn't make sense to me. Anyway, I converted some low-color icons for use with the wharf, you can find them at the end of the next page.
- The second posibility is that you don't use any icons and also don't use the wharf. Unfortunately a lot of functionality will be lost when dropping the wharf out, but you will get back some free memory. So if you think icons are the most important thing for a windowmanager, don't read ahaed. This should only be an alternative.
I took the second way and will try to give you an example.
Here is how it will look like:
Click the image to view it in 512x384 (51 KB) or view it in 1024x768 (173 KB)
You see, there are no icons and no wharf, but I think it looks very good and it only uses 62 colors, icluding the appbar