[arch-general] Openbox - great lightweight desktop, similar to icewm, but better in several regards

[David C. Rankin]

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