[arch-general] Openbox - great lightweight desktop, similar to icewm, but better in several regards
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
"David C. Rankin" <drankinatty@suddenlinkmail.com>:
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) You have to manage this by your own. Paste something like this into you ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml and be shure to have gmrun installed.
<keybind key="A-F2"> <action name="Execute"> <execute>gmrun</execute> </action> </keybind> In fact, I'm more the shortcutuser. Nearly _every_ keycombo is set with a shortcut to switch desktops, to start apps, contoll my musik. FYI I uploaded my [rc.xml to my server][1]. For wallpapering I wrote a small rubyscript, which parses my wallpaper directory and greats an output (xml) that's used from openbox as "dynamic menu". Pretty cool - as you can achieve anything you want.
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. Not only on older hardware. :-) I love theire pure minimalistic approach. I don't need any taskbar - I know my running apps. Openbox <3
[1]: http://jodl.bitterblume.com/rc.xml -- Gruß, Johannes Täglich http://blog.hehejo.de und du fühlst dich gut. Mast und Schotbruch mit dem http://segelsport-blog.de.
On Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:59:05 +0200 Johannes Held <mail@hehejo.de> wrote: .....
Paste something like this into you ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml and be shure to have gmrun installed.
<keybind key="A-F2"> <action name="Execute"> <execute>gmrun</execute> </action> </keybind> .....
Another good program is "dmenu". You can bind "dmenu_run" to a key. When it's launched and you start typing e.g. "svn" it will suggest not only "svn", but also "kdesvn" and "rapidsvn" - i.e. any program containing your typed characters as a substring. Cheers, Sergey
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 02:46:44AM -0500, David C. Rankin wrote:
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)
You need an extrenal program. gmrun is very nice; TAB command completion and history search.
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.
You can also get a full Arch menu. 1 Install archlinux-xdg-menu. 2 Uncomment openbox in /etc/update-menus.conf 3 Run (as root) /usr/sbin/update-menus ¹ You just created the pipe-menu /var/cache/xdg-menu/openbox/menu.xml, ready to be catted in the openbox menu configuration file. ¹ Source /etc/profile.d/kde.sh before update-menus if you have kdemod3 installed.
I come from a place where they say, "Friends don't let friends use non-tiling window managers" ;) As such, while we're on the topic, I think nothing really gives you your bang for your computer power like a tiling wm does. Some of the best ones now seem to be: - Xmonad - Wmii - Awesome WM (My personal favourite which comes with a run prompt, menus, and notifications built in) These systems tend to take more effort to run, but are very rewarding when you learn them. They let you work faster and better than ever, and are some of the most customizable window managers ever made. I've also noted a rather large community within Arch that uses tiling WMs and especially Awesome where it seems like half the IRC channel's on Arch. Sorry for the plug, cheers ;) -AT
On Wednesday 10 June 2009 07:47:04 Andrei Thorp wrote:
I come from a place where they say, "Friends don't let friends use non-tiling window managers" ;)
As such, while we're on the topic, I think nothing really gives you your bang for your computer power like a tiling wm does.
Some of the best ones now seem to be:
- Xmonad - Wmii - Awesome WM (My personal favourite which comes with a run prompt, menus, and notifications built in)
These systems tend to take more effort to run, but are very rewarding when you learn them. They let you work faster and better than ever, and are some of the most customizable window managers ever made. I've also noted a rather large community within Arch that uses tiling WMs and especially Awesome where it seems like half the IRC channel's on Arch.
Sorry for the plug, cheers ;)
-AT
Nothing to apologize for, this is the way the community is exposed to new projects and good new alternatives to add to the bag of tricks. I'll definitely take a look at Awesome first. Thanks! -- 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
Andrei Thorp wrote:
As such, while we're on the topic, I think nothing really gives you your bang for your computer power like a tiling wm does.
Some of the best ones now seem to be:
- Xmonad - Wmii - Awesome WM (My personal favourite which comes with a run prompt, menus, and notifications built in)
These systems tend to take more effort to run, but are very rewarding when you learn them.
I used to like ion too, till the developer started taking a hostile attitude with the open source community. DR
I've used Wmii some few times. But the last, I've finished sick, and I've had to stop my computer for one hour or two. Every windows taking all the place is a bit oppressing, especially with wide-screen. But I can give a try to Awesome, as an alternative Wm, for when KDE is broken. Or for every days use if I can. Tilling windows manager are cool.
Yeah, I think the big thing about using a tiling window manager is that it works best if you have a lot of terminals -- though reasonable ones (Awesome included) have a floating mode with regular windows with titlebars that is a lot like typical window managers. And yeah, shame but: - Wmii isn't really developed any longer, which is too bad because people really loved it. - Ion developer is a psychopath and his latest config files are batshit crazy to work with Re: DWM: - Xmonad and Awesome are both initally based on DWM, though both of them now have almost none of that original code left due to it being not actually that great (plus the wms changed a lot) - Awesome still handles tags like DWM, but has a lot more features, plus you don't need to use dmenu separately - I don't care, limiting your program by code size rather than features is a stupid idea. - If you need a ridiculously lightweight window manager, DWM is where it's at. Cheers, -AT
Andrei Thorp wrote:
Yeah, I think the big thing about using a tiling window manager is that it works best if you have a lot of terminals
If you have a lot of terminals, a tabbed or split-screen terminal app, like Konsole or Terminator is probably more efficient. DR
2009/6/10 David Rosenstrauch <darose@darose.net>
Andrei Thorp wrote:
Yeah, I think the big thing about using a tiling window manager is that it works best if you have a lot of terminals
If you have a lot of terminals, a tabbed or split-screen terminal app, like Konsole or Terminator is probably more efficient.
DR
I like a lot yakuake for tabbed terminal. using konsole technologies, it add a pretty cool drop-down feature, which allow to have a term at any moment, just by typing F12.
I like a lot yakuake for tabbed terminal. using konsole technologies, it add a pretty cool drop-down feature, which allow to have a term at any moment, just by typing F12.
The nice things about some of these more powerful window managers is that it's pretty simple to write a bit of configuration to make this work for _any_ terminal or program. -AT
If you have a lot of terminals, a tabbed or split-screen terminal app, like Konsole or Terminator is probably more efficient.
Disagreed, tiling window managers are entirely designed for tiling stuff. They tend to be _much_ better at it than stuff like screen and Terminator. I'm pretty confident in this assessment because I used screen for quite a while before I got into tiling. It's just not the same. Also, it's not even necessarily better on ram. If you're using a smart terminal like urxvt or XFCE Terminal, they can run in a shared mode where running a ton of terminals doesn't really skyrocket your ram (unlike gnome-terminal for example). -AT
On Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:02:39 -0400 Andrei Thorp <garoth@gmail.com> wrote:
Yeah, I think the big thing about using a tiling window manager is that it works best if you have a lot of terminals -- though reasonable ones (Awesome included) have a floating mode with regular windows with titlebars that is a lot like typical window managers.
And yeah, shame but: - Wmii isn't really developed any longer, which is too bad because people really loved it.
Cheers,
-AT
Alot of people think this which a shame tbh, wmii is still being maintained quite religiously. Have a look at google code http://code.google.com/p/wmii/updates/list to see latest updates. It's a superb twm, great sane defaults but slightly lacking in documentation of any real depth, although a new wiki is being worked on. -- Damian <rustyman@madasafish.com>
On Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:46:55 +0100 Damian <rustyman@madasafish.com> wrote:
On Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:02:39 -0400 Andrei Thorp <garoth@gmail.com> wrote:
Yeah, I think the big thing about using a tiling window manager is that it works best if you have a lot of terminals -- though reasonable ones (Awesome included) have a floating mode with regular windows with titlebars that is a lot like typical window managers.
And yeah, shame but: - Wmii isn't really developed any longer, which is too bad because people really loved it.
Cheers,
-AT
Alot of people think this which a shame tbh, wmii is still being maintained quite religiously. Have a look at google code http://code.google.com/p/wmii/updates/list to see latest updates. It's a superb twm, great sane defaults but slightly lacking in documentation of any real depth, although a new wiki is being worked on.
In fact, Kris Maglione is preparing a new wmii release and he has been spending a lot of effort in writing a new user guide. I've proof read it (see suckless ML, and wmii source repo) and it's looking good. "Not developed any longer" is just plain nonsense. Dieter
In fact, Kris Maglione is preparing a new wmii release and he has been spending a lot of effort in writing a new user guide. I've proof read it (see suckless ML, and wmii source repo) and it's looking good. "Not developed any longer" is just plain nonsense.
Yep, sorry, I've been misinformed. -AT
Excerpts from Andrei Thorp's message of Mi Jun 10 23:02:39 +0200 2009:
- Xmonad and Awesome are both initally based on DWM, though both of them now have almost none of that original code left due to it being not actually that great (plus the wms changed a lot)
Just to crush the urban myth that gets mentioned more than it should be recently: xmonad is not based on dwm. Yes, the idea of what should it do came from dwm, but it was written from scratch (in haskell, no C code ever).
Just to crush the urban myth that gets mentioned more than it should be recently: xmonad is not based on dwm. Yes, the idea of what should it do came from dwm, but it was written from scratch (in haskell, no C code ever).
Ah, understood. I think I read something about this like it's "based" on DWM, and I guess that means conceptually rather than literally. Sorry! -AT
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 8:47 PM, Andrei Thorp<garoth@gmail.com> wrote:
Some of the best ones now seem to be:
- Xmonad - Wmii - Awesome WM (My personal favourite which comes with a run prompt, menus, and notifications built in)
dwm[0] is a great place to start as well, especially if you're familiar with C and can patch it to your liking. The defaults are perfectly fine (besides colours), though, and once you get your head around tag-based window management, it's all you'll ever want. With dmenu, of course. [0] http://dwm.suckless.org/ -- Samuel 'Shardz' Baldwin - staticfree.info/~samuel
On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 03:52:11AM +0800, Samuel Baldwin wrote:
dwm[0] is a great place to start as well, especially if you're familiar with C and can patch it to your liking. The defaults are perfectly fine (besides colours), though, and once you get your head around tag-based window management, it's all you'll ever want.
With dmenu, of course.
+1 for dwm/dmenu. I really like grouping by tags.
+1 for dwm/dmenu. I really like grouping by tags.
Awesome certainly has tag-based management, and Xmonad probably also does considering it was a DWM clone once. In Awesome, at least, dmenu's pretty much obsoleted by Awesome's own built-in panels and tags have been taken much further than dwm due to the shifty add-on library that allows dynamic creation + deletion of tags, even based on events. Ex -> hit a bind to make a new tag (type to name it); set it up so when firefox opens, it gets its own tag, and that tag exists until firefox closes. -AT
Stiler (in AUR) allows tiling within openbox. I find it to be quite a nice program in conjunction with xbindkeys. Ben On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 5:47 AM, Andrei Thorp<garoth@gmail.com> wrote:
I come from a place where they say, "Friends don't let friends use non-tiling window managers" ;)
As such, while we're on the topic, I think nothing really gives you your bang for your computer power like a tiling wm does.
Some of the best ones now seem to be:
- Xmonad - Wmii - Awesome WM (My personal favourite which comes with a run prompt, menus, and notifications built in)
These systems tend to take more effort to run, but are very rewarding when you learn them. They let you work faster and better than ever, and are some of the most customizable window managers ever made. I've also noted a rather large community within Arch that uses tiling WMs and especially Awesome where it seems like half the IRC channel's on Arch.
Sorry for the plug, cheers ;)
-AT
David C. Rankin wrote:
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)
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.
Haven't tried openbox, but I like fluxbox a lot which is quite similar IIRC. I use flux as my "lightweight window manager" from time to time, when I don't want the bloat and/or slower load time of full-blown KDE. (e.g., I always use fluxbox as the WM inside of any VM.) DR
On Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:24:06 -0400 David Rosenstrauch <darose@darose.net> wrote:
David C. Rankin wrote:
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)
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.
Haven't tried openbox, but I like fluxbox a lot which is quite similar IIRC. I use flux as my "lightweight window manager" from time to time, when I don't want the bloat and/or slower load time of full-blown KDE. (e.g., I always use fluxbox as the WM inside of any VM.)
DR
I'm using openbox on my oldish machine, without panel or anything, and it's quite nice so far. Some apps I use or can recommend: 1) parcellite, so you can copy stuff, close the app you copied from, and still paste it. 2) obtheme, I only know it from the newsletter but it looks nice. 3) the nice wallpaper rotation script: #!/bin/bash WALLPAPERS="$HOME/.wallpapers" ALIST=( `ls -w1 -B --ignore=*.sh $WALLPAPERS` ) RANGE=${#ALIST[*]} SHOW=$(( $RANDOM % $RANGE )) feh --bg-scale $WALLPAPERS/${ALIST[$SHOW]} But I'm really tempted to try a tiling WM like awesome.. Regards, Philipp
Le Mercredi 10 à 9:46, David C. Rankin a écrit :
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.
I'm surprised that in this thread, nobody mentionned FVWM yet. It's a bit "the great old one", one upon which quite a number of other WM are based, but it is still actively developped. It is maybe a bit bigger that other WM mentionned, but we are far from KDE / GNOME / XFCE. A great strength of FVWM is its configurability (don't forget it is coming from someone who uses emacs ;-). The default desktop is rather rough. Instead, you are expected to configure it to your linking. The behaviour of the WM is completely definable. You can have titlebars with ten buttons bind to any mouse button doing any action you wish, dynamic menu that fetch there contents over the Net, panels that swallow arbitrary applications. It supports UTF-8, PNG transparency and blending, binding actions to mouse motion (haven't tried this one yet...), Xft2 fonts, etc. It can be as silent or as intrusive as you like, just giving you a frame around windows to move them or a full environment that doesn't pity some DE's ones. There is quite a diversity of shots in fvwm.org's screenshots section (but the artistic taste of some is sometimes lacking :). -- Fred
2009/6/12 Frédéric Perrin <frederic.perrin@resel.fr>:
I'm surprised that in this thread, nobody mentionned FVWM yet. It's a bit "the great old one", one upon which quite a number of other WM are based, but it is still actively developped. It is maybe a bit bigger that other WM mentionned, but we are far from KDE / GNOME / XFCE.
A great strength of FVWM is its configurability (don't forget it is coming from someone who uses emacs ;-). The default desktop is rather rough. Instead, you are expected to configure it to your linking. The behaviour of the WM is completely definable. You can have titlebars with ten buttons bind to any mouse button doing any action you wish, dynamic menu that fetch there contents over the Net, panels that swallow arbitrary applications. It supports UTF-8, PNG transparency and blending, binding actions to mouse motion (haven't tried this one yet...), Xft2 fonts, etc.
It can be as silent or as intrusive as you like, just giving you a frame around windows to move them or a full environment that doesn't pity some DE's ones.
There is quite a diversity of shots in fvwm.org's screenshots section (but the artistic taste of some is sometimes lacking :).
-- Fred
I've been using FVWM-Crystal for a little while and I'm not planning on going back to XFCE (which i've been using for a coupe of years). I too like FVWM (and FVWM-Crystal) configurability. Although it's a steep learning curve at first, I managed to get the basics to my liking farely quickly (thanks in part to the concept of recepies) and I will do more tweaking as I go along. For some screenshot you can check out http://www.fvwm-crystal.org/screenshots.html -- Louis Brazeau Informaticien
participants (16)
-
Alessandro Doro
-
Andrei Thorp
-
Ben Tartsa
-
Damian
-
Dave Heistand
-
David C. Rankin
-
David Rosenstrauch
-
Dieter Plaetinck
-
Frédéric Perrin
-
hollunder＠gmx.at
-
Jan Spakula
-
Johannes Held
-
Louis Brazeau
-
ludovic coues
-
Samuel Baldwin
-
Sergey Manucharian