If you want a highly configurable, lightweight window manager, OpenBox is the perfect choice. The OpenBox Window Manager is available for the most popular Linux Distributions, such as Ubuntu, Debian, Mageia, Fedora, openSuse etc.
In this article I will show you how to install OpenBox on Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal.
Because it is available in the official Ubuntu 12.10 repositories, all you have to do is:
$ sudo apt-get install openbox
If you don’t have a graphical log in, do this to autostart OpenBox at boot:
$ echo 'openbox-session' >> ~/.xinitrc
If you have Gnome installed and want to use OpenBox as the default Window Manager, do this:
$ echo 'openbox-gnome-session' >> ~/.xinitrc
To mix KDE with OpenBox, do this:
$ echo 'openbox-kde-session' >> ~/.xinitrc
The last two commands are the equivalent of you choosing GNOME/Openbox or KDE/Openbox from the graphical log in.