BATTLING THE WINDOW JUMBLE

No computer screen is ever big enough to organize a large num ber of windows in a perfect way. Windows can overlap and restrict the user’s view of the other windows in the background. Although some window managers such as KWin (the KDE win dow manager) offer settings that allow users to specify how newly opened win dows will be organized, this will not help you arrange a window jumble that already exists. This is where Whaw [1] can help. Whaw is a window-manager independent window layout tool. The tool not only supports Gnome and KDE, it is also quite happy with simpler win dow managers such as WindowMaker. Whaw lets you click to align windows side by side or drop all your active win dows in a previously defined area. Building the Window Cleaner Before you can run Whaw, you first need to build the tool from source code. To build Whaw, first download the current version 0.1.2 from [2], unpack the ar chive, and install the program using the normal three stage process: ./configure && make && su -c "make install". This puts the executable in /usr/ local/ bin. Our Suse Linux 9.3 test machine needed the popt-devel library to build the pack age; Debian needs both libpopt-dev and libxmu-dev.