WindowMaker and Darkburn WindowMaker theme

First. What is WindowMaker? WindowMaker is a very lightweight desktop environment which has been around since 1997. WindowMaker is very good to run with older hardware as it does not demand lot from the computer. For modern computers WindowMaker is a good choice if you want a fast desktop which is not bloated with all kinds of software by default. See more from WindowMaker here: http://windowmaker.org/

Second. What is Darkburn? Darkburn is a theme for WindowMaker which I build. Darkburn is provided as a GPL.

How to install WindowMaker?

WindowMaker should be found from the majority of Linux distributions so just startup your package manager and search for it. Alternatively you may try the following commands as a root or sudo user:

Few examples for the terminal:

Debian/Ubuntu: apt-get install wmaker wmaker-extra

Arch Linux: pacman -S windowmaker windowmaker-extra

The package wmaker provides the actual desktop environment and the extra provides some useful stuff like icons and themes.

Once you are done and you run WindowMaker you should have the following folder structure in your home directory:

/home/username/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Themes

When you desire to install themes you unzip them to the Themes folder in a form xxxx.themed. So when you download and install Darkburn you should have it as follows in Gnustep folder:

/home/usename/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Themes/darkburn.themed

Once you are done installing Darkburn you should change your theme by right clicking the desktop with a mouse and choosing Appearance–>Themes–>darkburn. To apply changes choose Restart WindowMaker from the right click menu and you should be now running Darkburn as your theme.

Additional notes:
Remember that WindowMaker does not support gtk3 themes. This means that you will have to get gtk2 themes for example from gnome-look.org in order to get rid of the gray default theming of gtk apps

Some software recommendations to go with WindowMaker:

Pcmanfm as a filemanager. Very good and fast program which works well with gtk2

Lxappearance as look and feel customizer. A handy little app which lets you easily customize your system theming and icons. You can place your icon themes inside .icons folder and themes to .themes folder which should be in your home directory if they do not exist just create them. You should of course place the unzipped folders inside the previously mentioned so that lxappearance can see them. Note: If you select a very dark theme for gtk2 firefox texts might be a bit troublematic to read on some occasions.

Lxmusic a nice Gui frontend for xmms2 which respects gtk2 theme settings and makes playing music a lightweight experience.

Volumeicon: You can get your keyboard volume keys easily working with this applet once you configure the keys correctly and run it alongside WindowMaker.

More info about Darkburn

Darkburn is WindowMaker theme which was designed by JJ Posti from techtimejourney.net

Darkburn is GPL and it includes the following parts:

*Darkburn wallpaper

*Darkburn Firefox persona –> Firefox persona publishing is delayed because Mozilla is currently doing some maintainance. See more from here: https://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/signin?return=%2Fen-US%2Fupload%3Fcheck%3Dfalse Update 8th of April: Darkburn Firefox persona has been submitted to Mozilla and is waiting for acceptance. It will be released with Creative Commons license which is close to GPL.

*Darkburn Windowmanager theme

*Conky box config. To enable conky config run: conky -c filename_location

If you have any feedback or comments to help the future development and possible porting of Darkburn to other windowmanagers you are more than welcome to send it.

Screenshots: