In August of 2007, my then boss Dr. Sandeep Joshi introduced me to the lightweight fully scriptable desktop window manager, FVWM, which is extremely minimalist, and I’ve been hooked to it ever since. On my laptop, I use XFCE, but have continued to run FVWM on my workstation. Dr. Joshi also introduced me to fvwm-script-setup95, a script that sets up a Windows-95 inspired minimalist theme. This script used to be part of the fvwm package available on most linux distros, but over the years, package managers must have felt it was unnecessary, so it’s now a bit hard to find. I use Debian Testing and Arch Linux, and don’t see the script bundled with either distro. After some digging around, I found the original perl setup script, and retrieved a backup of the fvwm-rc and other style files required to get the theme running. I’ve now uploaded these files here.

How to install the setup-95 theme

1. You need to first install fvwm on your distribution. It’s probably called fvwm2 these days.
2. After it’s setup, blow away the .fvwm directory in your home area, unpack the tarball (fvwmbackup) and rename it to .fvwm
3. Enable fvwm by adding the fvwm2 entry into your startwm.sh file (or for instance .vnc/xstartup)
4. Restart X.