Listmates, After reading the newsletter article about old boxes with minimal hardware collecting dust in a closet, I thought about the openbox desktop I had just given a run-through and thought I would pass it along. You have several lightweight desktops to choose from, icewm, fluxbox, etc.., but also add openbox to the list. As a minimal desktop, it is pretty cool. Damn fast, easily configurable, and well implemented. (it even ran Virtualbox with a XP guest for me) It is similar to icewm in operation, but if you want a panel, you will need to choose and install one. However it does allow for minimized apps and has a good app-switcher (alt+tab) and middle-mouse switches between desktops. The only thing I didn't find was an Alt+F2 run command equivalent (I'm sure it's there, I just haven't found it) If you do take a look at openbox (not KDE/openbox or Gnome/openbox, just openbox), then go ahead an install 'obmenu' and 'obconf' that help with menu configuration and theme settings, etc. To help with background selection, you can download wallmenu-0.3.py. I modified the one at my site to provide a sorted list of wallpapers in /usr/share/wallpapers that works well with the default openSuSE setup. Just edit the script and change the directory location if you want it to look in other locations. http://www.3111skyline.com/download/linux/openbox/wallmenu-0.3.py (you will need to edit the path to the wallpaper directory of your choosing in the script) Additionally, to make it available in the menu, you can add the script as a pipe-menu, or just download the menu.xml from my site and copy it to ~/.config/openbox/ and it is already there under the "System" menu. http://www.3111skyline.com/download/linux/openbox/menu.xml The only other file you need to play with to make openbox really functional is the ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh. You can set any additional programs or scrips you would like to start at login. On suse I needed to start wifi with knetworkmanager if it wasn't started, but with Arch, I just set my background image with feh: # Set background image feh --bg-scale /home/david/linux/wallpapers/1440/spacestation- panels-2-1440.jpg One other thing I did was to modify the Onyx theme to darken the inactive window titlebar and the active titlebar text. If you want to give it a try, just copy the "Onyx-dcr" directory to themes directory and it will be available in obconf for selection. All in all, I was as impressed with openbox as I was with icewm. Both are great lightweight window managers that will get the job done and, if you are on older hardware, they will definitely blow the doors off KDE/Gnome from a performance perspective. Pretty cool. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com