I finally got my Windows desktop looking nice ;)


Spent some time today fiddling around with BBLean and its associated plugins and themes. It's very much akin to the configuration of the CDE found on Solaris/HP-UX (it is in fact based from a Linux window manager). You can get the necessary software from BB4Win.org. Most of the basic config can be done via mouse clicks, but everything can be changed via text based config files. Plus - it's stable (not had any issues so far) and it doesn't take anywhere near the resources that explorer does. I'd been having a lot of issues with explorer lately as the project I'm working on involves file manipulation over large numbers of files - when I'd been looking through the results with explorer, there was a memeory leak happening somewhere as really large folders pushed the memory footprint through the roof, which never freed up - once the heap size of explorer got to the 200Mb size thing didn't update etc - and if left to creep up to ~256M lock ups and crashes occured. Plus that's all memory I'd rather be using for my development environment, right? Well, I've not seen BBLean go above 20M yet - I'm still using explorer but on closing it off the mem gets returned - using explorer as the shell too means it stays resident regardless. All in all, very happy - got an XP front end that feels like a Linux/Unix system now!!