For 3 years I've run Linux at home with FluxBox, but at work it's Win2kPro. I've long wished I could do a Win desktop like FluxBox - no icons, right-click to popup a menu on the screen, etc. Litestep looks great, like just what I need to get the look, feel, flexibility, and hopefully, the sheer speed of FluxBox. This gonna be great if it will work for me, but I'm not clear on a couple of things, so I gotta ask some dumb questions before I install...

I do a lot of work remotely from home using VNC, or sometimes, pcAnywhere (with Win4Lin) when I need some extra capabilities. But VNC and pcAnywhere disable active desktop for speed. I haven't seen a mention anywhere of active desktop, but does LiteStep use some elements of active desktop, so that when working remotely, I won't be able to use LiteStep? In other words, assuming active desktop capability is necessary, I'd need to re-run setshell, set explorer as the shell and reboot before leaving work so I can as a user *without* LiteStep set as the shell to work remotely? Anyone here use Litestep on a remote client?

Now asuming that the answer is yes to the above and explorer must be set as the shell for remote work, if I forget to reset the shell and login as a user *with* Litestep, any idea what's gonna happen? Not fatal, I'm sure, just curious...

One more dumb question - does each user get their own theme, etc at login, like explorer? I assume the answer is "Of course, ya dummy!"...but I want to be clear on this and I haven't seen a definite "yes" anywhere.

I use ultravnc from home to my work pc, both are running XP with litestep as the shell. I have no problem with either. I think ultra has more capabilities then just straight VNC, one of which is able to change desktop settings. Hope this helps.
Bob

The only problem people have reported that I can remember is problems with LSBox over VNC. I used to load a straight up black and white theme over VNC and had no issues with LS and it became really really fast. Good luck

Thanks for the help. I've got a funny feeling about pcAnywhere not working with Litestep, but if VNC works, that'll be good enough. VNC is pretty quick now, but faster is always better.

So...this weekend I'll install Litestep and see what happens. I'll post the result here once everything is figured out, in case anyone else is curious.

The problem (for some people, not for you) actually is that Active Desktop doesn't even work if Explorer is not your shell. VNC sometimes has problems with transparency stuff iirc.

Ok, here's where I'm at to this point....

Installed Litestep - click-click your grandma could do it simple. It runs the default theme fine, and working remotely is no problem. Didn't really notice a speed difference, but this is a fast machine and everything is quick on it anyway. So far so good. But...well, look, I really want to use Litestep. I like the concept. I like the attitude of those working on a basically free project. If I can get it working for me, a donation is in order. The M$ idea of a WM sucks a large one, and a project like this is badly needed. But I'm having enough problems that Litestep is not doing it for me at this point.

A few misc bugs kinda bother me, but no biggie. The real problem is installing themes. The default theme (no offense to the author) won't cut it for me. But some others come fairly close, at least to where I could probably do some mods to them and get about what I'm after. I tried downloading and installing 7-8 themes of the minimalist variety 'cause that's what I'm looking for. But I never got any installed sucessfully. They all needed some missing modules, and when I tried to let the Litestep theme installer download and install 'em, it would get some or most modules, but every time it failed to unzip at least one module and so install failed. One simple theme was missing only 1 module, so, feeling frisky, I tried running it without it, but that was a stupid mistake. The theme loaded, but no popup menu, no icons, no taskbar - nothing to do anything. I had no choice but to log in as administrator and run uninstall.exe using "runas" with my user ID so I could get the unit functional, as it was before with my user ID again. Then I reinstalled and tried just switching from shell to explorer (using the desktop icons) to see if I could leave Litestep installed and play with getting it right when I didn't need to get real work done. But while it does make the shell switch a after a reboot, the default Litestep wallpaper stays and will not go away. My default background is normally plain black, partly 'cause it works well when transferred by VNC with 8-bit color to the veiwer. The Litestep wallpaper is pretty bad on the viewer in 8-bit - hard to take. So I've unistalled again for now.

So it goes...I'm still going to spend more time with this, but on a test machine instead of my daily gotta-get-stuff-done unit. I think once I get the hang of simple themes and how they work, I can still do a pretty good imitation of the custom FluxBox themes I've worked up for home. In other words, I still think Litestep will let me work up a really functional Windoze desktop. I see there's good work being done here to try and make Windoze desktops at least partially as configurable as in Linux. Litestep definitely has possibilities. Thanks to those putting their time into this project.

As far as the theme problems I'm having, if anyone has suggestions, I'd sure be willing to listen and put some time into trying to make them work.