When I said "it seems faster" I only meant that it seems faster running xfce4 via Xephyr than running it via VNC. I think it's going to be slow no matter what WM you use.

JWM is easy to achieve - just apt-get install. It seems quite quick, too.

I have a question: when I call these windows managers in a Xephyr windows *as root* there's no problem in opening other applications like the console terminal.
But, if I call the window manager *as user* there are dbus problems for several apps.
Do you see such a behavior too?

Also, when opening another window manager in a Xephyr window, I lose the ability of getting "blue" function keys like numbers, and that's quite unpractical. Unless there's a workaround, I'll stick to hildon.

sylpheed works very well when you put it in vertical mode. very suitable to the tablet. xchat in debian is much better than that in maemo imo. i'll be using dillo for all of my browsing from now on methinks.

also, abiword, when you turn off real time spell checking is really very snappy.

Dillo, while very fast, seems a bit on the spartan side for me. It seems to have a similar feature set to links2; good for simple web sites, but not much use for modern web application sites.

No, I don't. Can you give specific times when this happens, and what the errors look like?

This may be a problem with permissions. The application may have created some settings files when you were root, and then when you try running it as user, it can't read or write to the settings files. I know that's what happened with Xephyr, that's why my script has those chmod and chgrp lines in it. Also, make sure your chroot script copies the hildon /etc/group and /etc/passwd files so that your chroot "user" account is the same "user" as in hildon. Otherwise you won't be able to share tmp files between hildon and debian.

Xephyr, XFCE4 and AbiWord seem to have no problems with my BT keyboard. I can access all of the keys, including the blue numbers and the green symbols. I don't know what's happening there to you.

The biggest problem I have with the Xephyr WM method is that it just seems slow.

Dillo is real nice; it's a shame about the developer needing to eat... It got put on the back burner, and will probably never be brought up to speed now. CSS and such were supposed to arrive right after the version which is now in perpetual alpha.

I find it (the GTK version, I haven't tried the FLTK alpha) better than links2, overall... I think it misses "proper" frames support, but frames are rarely a good idea anyway, IMHO.

But of course, modern web apps are designed around modern web browsers, and no light-weight will ever be caught up on enough features to do well on them.

I got all excited when summatusmentis posted an expanded icon .desktop file that included the line
... but OpenOffice still has no sidebar icon. Anyone know what the two lines he added are for?

I think you're right.

I think the best bet is to go backwards, like MicroB or Fennec. Take a modern standards-compliant browser engine and aggressively optimize it and strip it down.

I just noticed that epiphany complained of dbus errors when called as a user. Doesn't matter if it is in Xephyr or in Hildon.

FIXED: When your application complains of dbus errors, then, as root, do the following:
That should fix things. It's a permissions problem again; these files are being created as root/root and you need it set to user/users.

I think it wouldn't hurt to put those lines in the hilda and xephce4 scripts. Anyone else have any ideas?

I have been able to get Gnash to display Flash videos (albeit slowly), and gappletviewer can run Java applets, but I can't seem to get a browser to run either the Gnash plugin or the java plugin.

I currently believe the best bet for a browser to do these things would be kazehakase, since it is a small, fast gecko (xulrunner) based browser that supposedly can run mozilla plugins. Epiphany-webkit doesn't do plugins, and installing konqueror means installing the whole KDE ball of wax.

Here are some screenshots. The first is the Gnash standalone player running a flash video:



Here is gappletviewer (found in the Debian classpath package) running this java applet, standalone: