Window manager
Nate Drake gets into the frame of things with Window Maker – adesktop experience reminiscent of a ’90s Mac.
In describing Window Maker, we can do no better than quote the homepage: “Window Maker is an X11 window manager originally designed to provide integration support for the GNUstep desktop environment, although it can run standalone. In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NeXTSTEP user interface.”
NeXTSTEP was an operating system based on Unix-derived BSD. After its developer’s acquisition by Apple in the mid-’90s, elements of the NeXTSTEP GUI were integrated into OS X.
If you feel like a trip down memory lane, the good news is that Window Maker is compatible with virtually every Unixbased OS, including Linux, Solaris and BSD.
If you’re used to installing via a graphical software centre, the bad news is that this cross-platform compatibility comes at a price, as the main page advises compiling the program from source.
Snaggy setup
In theory, this isn’t a major issue, as the website documentation section has an installation guide. Sadly, this is where we ran into snags, though we were able to compile and install wmaker on Ubuntu and Peppermint OS (which uses XFCE), subject to installing all the required dependencies, such as libjpeg-dev, which helps to display different backgrounds.
But when we tried to choose Window Maker as the window manager from the login screen, the desktop failed to load. We eventually managed to get a session running in an Xubuntu VM by installing wmaker and wmaker common from the Ubuntu repositories.
Assuming you succeed in launching Window Maker, you’ll discover a few minimalist icons floating around the desktop. Right-click to configure system settings and launch applications. This interface will be familiar to anyone who’s used Xfce (or indeed NeXTSTEP), in that disabled options are greyed out. Options marked with a triangle can be selected to open a submenu.
