After I install a new version of Linux, I usually take a good look at the screen. Does it have a task bar? Can you find your window after it was minimized? Lately, some developers have been struck by some sort of amnesia brought on by the stress created by the mobile sector offerings.

Fortunately, in Linux we do have plenty of other choices. I will describe some of them in this article, and I’ll attempt to measure the RAM memory requirements. I use free command in an xterm before and after the graphic environment is started on a separate X server (Xephyr). The computer is an older 64-bit machine, running Ubuntu 12.04 with LXDE as desktop environment.

Note: the tool I use to set it all up is virtenv. I would say it is pretty much experimental at this moment, alpha stage maybe early beta. It sets up a Xephyr xserver running Joe’s Window Manager in a Linux kernel container (LXC). I only have to shut down JWM, apt-get install the new window manager, and run it. The beauty is the container works in a separate filesystem, and it will not overwrite the real filesystem on my computer.