IceWM FAQ and Howto: Introduction

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## 2. Introduction

In this section I give a short description of what IceWM is.

## 2.1 What is IceWM?

IceWM is a window manager for the X window system. It is designed to be small, fast, lightweight, and to emulate the look and feel of Motif, OS/2 and Windows.

While it is very configurable, it is not pathologically so (like Enlightenment or FVWM). In short, IceWM provides a customizable look with a relatively consistent feel.

Now that you know what IceWM is and are still reading on you are obviously interested in using it. To use a program you will first need to have it. The obvious question is:

## 2.2 Where to get it?

Marko Macek (the author of IceWM) maintains a web page from which you can download the latest development version as well as a frozen version. It is located at

> `http://www.icewm.org`

## 2.3 Under which operating systems does it run?

IceWM successfully ran under (in alphabetical order):

- AIX 4.3.3 (reported by griswold@acm.org)
- Digital Unix (Compaq Tru64 Unix)
- FreeBSD (reported by MJ Ray, h089@mth.uea.ac.uk)
- Linux on DEC Alpha (64 bit architecture)
- Linux on Intel compatibles (32 bit architecture)
- NetBSD (reported by MJ Ray, h089@mth.uea.ac.uk)
- OpenBSD (reported by MJ Ray, h089@mth.uea.ac.uk)
- OS/2
- Solaris (reported by MJ Ray, h089@mth.uea.ac.uk)
- Windows (reported by Pavel Roskin, pavel_roskin@geocities.com)

## 2.4 Minimal Requirements

A default IceWM installation just depends on the X window system (any X window system will do, no matter how old or from which vendor) and libXpm and therefore should run sufficiently fast even on an old 386, a sparc IPC or any other box capable of running X. For some of the nifty features like shaped borders, gradient frames and gradient menus it might help to have a computer which is slightly faster or which doesn't have an ancient X version.

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