Mandrake 10.1

It's been a bit over three months now since I installed Mandrakelinux 10.1 on my IBM ThinkPad. And things are going very nicely indeed with it. One thing I've been tinkering with is the look and feel of things in the Fluxbox window manager— that was always sort of a side concern with me before, don't ask me why. You can see the results in the screenshots.

Fluxbox has KDE support and partial GNOME support. You can get full GNOME support— at least, full enough support for my look-and-feel purposes— by adding the GNOME settings daemon to your Fluxbox startup file.

It so happens that I have matching Qt and GTK themes which imitate the look of the old SGI IRIS Indigo. Very nice for those of us whose theming taste already runs to greys and purples. My wallpaper was reconstructed by copy-and-paste from an IRIS Indigo screenshot I ran across somewhere. I like my brother's description of my wallpaper: "like the cast iron fretwork that used to appear on turn-of-the-(twentieth)-century building interiors as decoration, especially in Chicago." In Nautilus (below) I also use IRIS Indigo icons— found those on some site out there, though I don't believe it was on GNOME-Look.org.


Window borders are Klowner's Graphite Integration. (I also did find a CDE/4dwm Motif-like window border theme, but come on, ugly is ugly.) And to top it off, I use a transparent redglass cursor, which you can get in Mandrake 10.1 by adding the following line to your .Xdefaults file:

Xcursor.theme: redglass

So there you go. Rather retro look, I like it. Oh, and you can also find a full-size screenshot right here.