[sf-lug] make my thinkpad into a typewriter

[Matt Price]

hi folks,

greetings from toronto!

i have a thinkpad x31 -- a medium-powered macine by today's standards
-- which is currently running a vanilla ubuntu.  i'm not unsatisfied
with it but i'd like to be able to work without all the distracting
bells and whistles of the gnome environment.  Thus far any attempts to
load a framebuffer module kill my console, which means the console
really isn't adequate for doing work -- can't see enough text on the
screen.  So  i'm looking for a lightweight window manager with the
following characteristics:

- boots very fast
- tiled or tabbed interface
- easy way to maximize a window to fill the whole screen (so, overriding
the tiling).  
- fast keybindings that don't conflict with emacs

basically, i want to run a maximized emacs session most of the time, but
have other apps in the background waiting in case i need them.  and i
wouldn't mind to have some tind of statusbar or something, with say the
battery levels and the time displayed -- so i don't have to switch to a
terminal just to type "date" or "acpi"    

I will also sometimes need a wireless internet connection, so i was
thinking i would need a systray for nm-applet -- but i see that there's
a new cnetworkmanager applet for the command line, so maybe i'd just
use that.  wouldn't mind the systray though.

i like the looks of xmonad but don't see that there's an easy way to
toggle a window between tiled and maximized state.  if anyone has a
configuration for xmonad -- or any other lightweight wm -- that does
what i'm looking for, i'd love to see it.  thanks as always,

matt




-- 
Matt Price
matt.price at utoronto.ca