Linux systems use the X-windows system as its graphical interface. X windows systems are built on a number of components, and the way that input focus and window controls are done is actually outsourced to a type of program called a "window manager".

In the great Unix and now Linux tradition, there is more than one way to do things, and different people will want to do things differently.

At this talk, a number of different window managers will be evangelized by devotees of each. The evening will start with an overview of how window managers and X-windows interact.

About the Speaker

Bart Trojanowski is a Linux kernel hacker, currently self employed working for clients seeking Linux development and consulting services (www.jukie.net). When not hacking Linux drivers and embedded systems, he enjoys playing with his two kids.

See http://www.jukie.net/~bart/ for more info.

About the Speaker

Ian! D. Allen: http://www.idallen.com/

Ian! D. Allen <idallen@idallen.ca> currently has a day job as professor of Computer Studies at the Algonquin College Woodroffe Campus. At night, in between marking Bourne shell scripts, he writes Perl and shell scripts to automate things on his Linux desktop and does volunteer sysadmin and web work for his hobbies, e.g. http://www.fools.ca/, http://www.contactimprov.ca/, http://www.authenticmovement.ca/. He has an Honours BA in Psychology and a MMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, where he spent most of his time doing amateur theatre and rewriting Troff and the C Shell instead of working on his Masters thesis. His first computer course was WATFIV (FORTRAN) on punch cards in 1974. His first email account was "idallen" on a Waterloo Honeywell 6050 GECOS system in 1976. He has been programming on Unix since 1976 (V7 on a PDP-11) and the Internet since about 1981. His first "home" computer was a VAXstation 3100 running Ultrix. He acquired his first Intel computer (P166 Windows 95) in 1996 and his first Linux distribution (SuSE 5.2) at an OCLUG meeting a few years later. He is married to midwife Jan Teevan and plays step-father to her three young adults (who are now all out of the home). He has two favourite sayings: (1) Less code is better code; and (2) If this were easy, everyone would be doing it.