Replacing Aqua with an X11 Window Manager? (icewm)

[amphibious]

I just got a brand new Mac Pro and I'm interested in figuring out how to completely replace the Aqua window manager with icewm. I've seen various X11 window managers running on OS X, but they always seem to be running inside Aqua (ie. the white bar is still on top, the dock is still present) and I'd like to just run straight icewm.

I haven't figured out the correct search terms to google for a tutorial on this and I don't know for certain that it's possible, which is why I'm posting here.

If anyone has any resources to help me figure this out, I'd appreciate it...

Thanks!

 

[mkrishnan]

I quickly found this tutorial to disable the launching of the window manager...

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20020501090420147

Perhaps if you take this and instead of just commenting out those lines, start icewm in the same place?

 

[ChrisA]

I just got a brand new Mac Pro and I'm interested in figuring out how to completely replace the Aqua window manager with icewm. I've seen various X11 window managers running on OS X, but they always seem to be running inside Aqua (ie. the white bar is still on top, the dock is still present) and I'd like to just run straight icewm.

I haven't figured out the correct search terms to google for a tutorial on this and I don't know for certain that it's possible, which is why I'm posting here.

If anyone has any resources to help me figure this out, I'd appreciate it...

Thanks!

You can't. Aqua is not a window manager and does not use X11. The normal Mac OSX desktop is not based in X11. X11 if you run it at all runs as a normal Mac OSX applation and makes calls into the Mac graphic system.

On a normal UNIX system the X11 server is the lowest level layer but on Mac OSX X11 runs on top of the graphics system

 

[mkrishnan]

On a normal UNIX system the X11 server is the lowest level layer but on Mac OSX X11 runs on top of the graphics system

This sort of is and isn't true... the X11 application that allows X11 to run as a second windows manager runs on top of Aqua, but I don't think it follows that all windows managers running on top of Darwin need Aqua.... one would need a Darwin-compatible binary of the wm in question, however.

 

[daveL]

Virtual Desktop

In the past I've run a virtual desktop manager (Desktop Manager, for instance). The I'd pick a desktop space for X11 stuff. I could have a complete full screen X11/Gnome environment I could flip to when I wanted / needed to and then flip back to my normal Aqua desktop.