[ale] Lightweight Window Manager Issues

[Jeff Hubbs]

I know a good many of you go outside the KDE/Gnome realm in the name of
speed and/or small footprint.

I've been doing a kind of penance by working on setting up a Pentium/60
(yup - the dead-end Socket 4 and the floating-point bug) machine for a
church.  My only objective here is to create a GUI machine that plays
games along the lines of xmahjongg or GNUchess.  

Fluxbox, ICEwm, FWVM2, and Windowmaker have been tried, using either
Gentoo or SuSE 7.0 or 7.1 (I can't recall which).  Only the SuSE has
produced X that isn't just horribly broken-seeming (odd crosshatched
patterns in what should be blank areas in terminal windows, for example)
but I'm running into this thing where I want to be able to make KDE-,
Win-, or Gnome-like desktop icons that launch apps, but I can't seem to
be able to do it.   I took a stab at reverse-engineering how Windowmaker
built its little sliding panels, but even if figured out how to do it, I
don't think anyone with fair Windows experience would be able to figure
out how to launch the games using those.  

So, is there a WM I'm missing, or am I just not seeing how you make
app-launching desktop icons in these WMs?

- Jeff

-- 
Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net>