Re: [gNewSense-users] Fluxbox in gnewsense?

[Peter Garrett]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 20:52:52 -0700
"Ringo Kamens" <address@hidden> wrote:

> I am thinking about trying out other window systems aside from gnome.
> KDE doesn't really appeal to me and I'm looking at fluxbox right now
> (because it looks awesome). Has anybody had any experience using it in
> gnewsense or other distros? What did you find? Is it faster? 

Yes, it is faster :) It is also extremely configurable, but some of the
best features require a bit of file editing ( it isn't hard though). Very
good docs at

http://fluxbox.org/docbook.php

> I have
> heard it is a little harder to use and I was wondering how hard such a
> transition would be. Are there any unexpected hurdles I should be
> warned about? 

On the whole, there are no major hurdles. The easiest way to get a
complete menu is to install the "menu" package and run " sudo
update-menus" once - after that all deb packages *should* automatically
add an entry in the menu on install. If you prefer to customise your menu,
you can copy the global menu to ~/.fluxbox/mymenu or similar, and point
the startup files at that menu. All this (except the "menu" package) is
covered in the documentation I linked above. If you compile your own,
there is a utility in the compiled program called
"fluxbox-generate_menu" , but I don't think the fluxbox .deb includes this.

Personally, I like to compile my own fluxbox from the latest source at
http://fluxbox.org , but the recent packaged fluxbox is fine if you don't
want to do this, and easier because it automatically puts Fluxbox in the
login (gdm). If you compile it you need to add your own entries for this,
which is not difficult, but is just one more file to edit
( /usr/share/xsessions/fluxbox.desktop)

As above, I really recommend that you read the docs I linked - you can
download them in various formats so that you can refer to them locally. I
like to use the dillo browser to browse locally installed html docs :) It
is blindingly quick to start and quite adequate for text like this.

HTH and all that ...

Peter