installing new WM

Ok, heres the problem. The first of which being I am a linux noob for the most part. I have learned and become confortable with most terminal commands, but still, i've only been at it for less than a week.

Anyway, I have RH 9 installed(That will be changing soon) and I want to install a new WM. IceWM.

I just want to know how to do it so when I install another distro(either vector or RH 7.3) I can just do it quickly and painlessly.

Heres what I've done so far.

First of all, I hear RPM's can be a pain w/ dependencies etc, so I decided to go the other route w/ the source.

I d/l IceWm-1.2.8.tar.gz

so, I did:

[/root/home/usr/] tar xvzf IceWm-1.2.8.tar.gz
[/root/home/usr/]cd IceWm-1.2.8
[/root/home/usr/]./configure
[/root/home/usr/]make
[/root/home/usr/]make install

and according to several help sites I read, this was all that was to installation.

The problem comes in primarily when I want to change it to my default WM.

First, it says to add IceWm to your $PATH. I had no idea how to do this, so I looked for some help and found that if I do:

export PATH = $PATH:/root/filename

that it should append the path. But I get an error instead. Also, I can't find the IceWm executable.

Then it says I need to add/write a script in .Xsession

but when I open that in vi it says its a new file... Is that what is supposed to happen.

Anyway, those are my hangups, so if anyone can help I would appreciate it.

First, since you don't know where IceWM is, there is no point in editing the $PATH, is there? I'm guess it is somewhere beneath your /usr directory -- or at least it should be.

#> find /usr -iname "ice*"

Then, I don't think it is actually necessary to add it to your $PATH. Let's assume the find command determined that the window manager is at /usr/local/bin/icewm.

RedHat uses the .Xclients-default file to determine the window manager and what else launches during X startup, so edit it.

Here is mine:

/usr/local/fluxbox/bin/fluxbox

So yours might be:

/usr/local/bin/icewm

Yep, that's the only line you'll need. You can actually comment out whatever is already in .Xclients-default or back it up and create a new file with just that one line.

Ah ok thanks.