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Window Managers

A window manager lets you move, iconify and resize windows. It also provides menus. In some systems this functionality might all be bundled in with the "file manager" (the program that displays files and folders as icons), but usually in Unix the window manager and file manager are separate programs: you can "mix and match" or have one without the other.

On the Teaching System we use Compiz by default, though you can use a non-default window manager for a session. After typing in one's username and clicking on the "Log In" button some menus appear at the bottom of the screen. One of them is GNOME by default, but it offers others (e.g. fvwm) as options.

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