Aaron Lynch

I have traditionally used Gnome as my desktop environment of choice, (Ubuntu) with a sprinkling of KDE here and there. I personally enjoy Gnome and KDE equally, they are fantastic collections of software. But, recently I was struck with the desire to find something different.

THE QUEST FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT

The other day, I downloaded Enlightenment .

What is the Enlightenment project?

Enlightenment began as a window manager for X. Its design goal is to be as configurable as possible - in look AND in feel. Enlightenment's current design aim is to become a desktop shell. That means it will manage your application windows, being able to launch applications, and also manage your files.

My Impressions:

It was very nice to look at, but right off the bat when I changed the theme, it became unusable...like, I couldn't click on anything. Restarting X didn't fix it, rebooting didn't fix it. I had to find the .e directory that Enlightenment writes to store configuration data and delete it, then restart it again. Next thing I did was attempt to change the font. That threw some sort of ABORT error and that was the end of Enlightenment for AJ.

Don't Do It: Next up...Looking Glass 3D. The Sun Java desktop. Not that great, don't even bother.

Finally, here comes the Fluxbox

After a quick sudo apt-get install fluxbox, you will notice right away how much smaller this is than anything else so far.

After unpacking 4698kB of additional disk space will be used.

Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Oh yes, yes I do want to continue.

What is Fluxbox

• Fluxbox is a lightweight window manager for the X Windowing System.

• Fluxbox provides configurable window decorations, a root menu to launch applications and a toolbar that shows the current workspace name, a set of application names and the current time. There is also a workspace menu which allows you to add or remove workspaces. The `slit' can be used to dock small applications, e.g. most of the bbtools can use slit.

• Fluxbox can iconify windows to the toolbar, in addition to adding the window to the Icons submenu of the workspace menu. One click and they reappear. A double-click on the titlebar of the window will shade it, i.e. the window will disappear leaving only the titlebar visible.

• Fluxbox uses its own graphics class to render its images on the fly. By using style files, you can determine in great detail how your desktop looks. Fluxbox styles are compatible with those of Blackbox 0.65 or earlier versions, so users migrating can still use their favourite themes.

• Fluxbox supports the majority of the Extended Window Manager Hints (EWMH) specification, as well as numerous other Window Hinting standards. This allows all compliant window managers to provide a common interface to standard features used by applications and desktop utilities.
  
  
  

FLUXBOX IS DIFFERENT

One thing that you will notice is that once you boot into Fluxbox, is that it pretty much is up and running instantly once you have logged in. Username, Password, Done! This is a good sign.

Now, this stripped down window manager takes some getting used to. There is no desktop. You can't drag stuff to a desktop, you can't right click create shortcuts, etc. The most common thing about Fluxbox is that you have to hand write config choices to a file somewhere.

DESKTOP ICONS/SHORTCUTS

So in that fashion, there is a way to roll-your-own desktop icons using idesk (sudo apt-get install idesk). Lets say you want to create a desktop icon to launch gnome-terminal for example.

First, you need to create a folder under /home/yourname/ called .idesktop Now, under that new directory, /home/alynch/.idesktop we need to create a link.

vim ~/.idesktop/terminal.lnk

and write this to the file.

table Icon

Caption: Terminal

Command: gnome-terminal

Icon: /usr/share/pixmaps/gnome-terminal.png

end

Ok, so now you restart Fluxbox but still no icon? Thats because you need to start idesk when you start Fluxbox. Enter the “startup” file. (~/.fluxbox/startup)

I personally really like this startup file, it is simple and straightforward.

In order to start idesk on startup, look at the section of your startup file that has

#Applications you want to run with fluxbox and add idesk &

CHANGING YOUR WALLPAPER

There is no graphical interface for changing your wallpaper in fluxbox (that I know of at least). So there, again, is a place (a few actually) for you to write in the path to the image file you would like to use as your wallpaper. I choose to assign my wallpaper path at startup. You can add a line in your startup file like this

fbsetbg -f /home/alynch/Images/wallpaper/cooltuxnotxt5vq.jpg

You may or may not experience this, but I usually have trouble finding wallpapers to fit my resolution (1920x1200) so most wallpapers I have don't fill up the entire screen without a little help. (fbsetbg -f won't do it natively) so I installed a little program called feh (sudo apt-get install feh). Now, my wallpapers fill the entire screen.

EDITING THE FLUX MENU

You could probably guess by now, what it takes to alter the fluxbox menu. Go check out the “stock” menu config at ~/.fluxbox/menu and see what your options are.

Here is some of my personal ~/.fluxbox/menu config file:

[submenu] (AJL Stuff)

[submenu] (Servers)

[submenu] (Apache Web Server)

[exec] (Start) {gksudo /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start}

[exec] (Stop) {gksudo /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl stop}

[exec] (Restart) {gksudo /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart}

[end]

[submenu] (ColdFusion Server)

[exec] (Start) {gksudo /opt/jrun4/bin/jrun start cfusion}

[exec] (Stop) {gksudo /opt/jrun4/bin/jrun stop cfusion}

[exec] (Restart) {gksudo /opt/jrun4/bin/jrun restart cfusion}

[end]

[end]

[exec] (Eclipse) {/home/alynch/apps/eclipse/Eclipse3.2/eclipse}

[exec] (Data Studio) {/home/alynch/apps/datastudio/datastudio-bundled.sh}

[exec] (Filezilla 3) {/home/alynch/apps/FileZilla3/bin/filezilla}

[exec] (Swiftfox) {/opt/swiftfox/swiftfox}

[exec] (Vmware) {vmware}

[exec] (ktorrent) {ktorrent}

[exec] (Nautilus) {nautilus --no-desktop --browser}

[end]

OTHER COOL STUFF

You can see some cool system monitor stuff on my desktop screenshot, this was done using conky. Take some time to check out conky if you want a highly configurable monitor that is really lightweight.

Coming from Gnome, I became really dependent on the fantastic applet for managing my network connections (nm-applet). I added it, along with gnome-keyring, to my startup programs.

I really have gotten used to Nautilus as my filemanager, so in order to launch this app without loading a bunch of gnome stuff with it, you can do this: nautilus --no-desktop --browser

SUMMARY

I really am digging the fluxbox so far, it is different than Gnome or KDE and I think that is what is keeping fluxbox as my default GDM session for now.