Fluxbox configuration

red07 said:
Hi, I just downloaded Fluxbox and Fluxbox themes into i386 FreeBSD 10.0
How do I add the themes to the Fluxbox folder so i can start using it to make it look something like these:
https://www.google.com/search?q=freebsd ... 24&bih=594
I'm new to BSD, and I used to use Slackware; but this operating system is a bit different.
Click to expand...
Have you checked out: Fluxbox Wiki. There appears to be some decent How-Tos to get you started with x11-wm/fluxbox configuration and customization.
 
" I do not use Fluxbox anymore, but I can share my ~/.fluxboxdirectory if You are interested.
-vermaden »"
Click to expand...

- that would be really cool. I am new to FreeBSD and am not really certain how to make changes in any folders yet. I installed FluxBox not realizing I'd have to still add configs to it. I don't mind doing that, but i have no real idea how.
 
THANKS!!
- in version 10.0 what's the best way to install it from the fluxbox xterm terminal?
Once i know I'll never forget. ( which means i'm gonna write it down in ink if i have to lol)
 
You'll note that underneath he has ~/.fluxbox. What is meant is that you can take the entire directory and save it to your home directory, as a directory called .fluxbox. Note the dot before the name. A user's $HOME/.fluxbox directory has various key shortcuts, some start up items, perhaps a preferred location of an application, and so on.

So, once you download the tar.gz file, in your home directory, you might rename your original .fluxbox directory if you have one. (If you don't, don't worry about it, but I think fluxbox creates one the first time you start it.)
Then, from your terminal
tar xvf DOT.fluxbox.tar.gz

This will create a directory in your home directory, called DOT.fluxbox. Now you can rename it to .fluxbox and @vermaden's file will be used as your fluxbox directory.

@vermaden, what are you using these days? I think I still have a fluxbox openbox page with a link to a thread of yours on these forums. As for me (if you're at all interested), I'm using openbox at work with a 4 monitor zaphod setup and at home, with a single screen, dwm.





'
 
Last edited by a moderator:
scottro said:
@vermaden, what are you using these days? I think I still have a fluxbox openbox page with a link to a thread of yours on these forums. As for me (if you're at all interested), I'm using openbox at work with a 4 monitor zaphod setup and at home, with a single screen, dwm.
Click to expand...

Once I tried Openbox I have stayed with it and use it till now.


I also tried various tiling options for Openbox, but pytyle* is broken on BSDs, so I wrote my own personal tiler in POSIX sh with some simple layout (tile.sh).

I also added Windows like aero shortcuts like WIN + ARROW so that focused window takes half left/right/top/bottom side of the screen.

Other then that tint2 to know what is launched on which desktop + Openbox Workspace Menu and lxpanel for quick launch, along with conky for most important stats.

Could You tell me more about Your ZAPHOD SETUP?
 
It has four discrete video cards, NVidia's, and I was only able to get it working as zaphod rather than any kind of twinview or xinerama. This was actually fine with me, due to the way it was set up.

When I first started the job, back in September, I could only get it working with fluxbox, and even then was having issues. I was using (after breaking X by trying to do it by hand) nvidia-settings and it was a bit peculiar--only showing three monitors, but after some dragging around, I finally got it working. (If you want a copy of the xorg.conf, PM me and I'll send it along--it was configured through the nvidia-settings GUI, to my shame.)

It took some playing around to get it working in openbox. It can be done in .xinitrc but I wound up adding lines to /usr/local/bin/openbox-session.

So, my openbox-session has
Code: 
DISPLAY=:0.1 openbox &
DISPLAY=0.2 openbox &
DISPLAY=0.3 openbox &

above the last two lines (the comment to run openbox and the actual exec line).

I've also tried having 3 openbox screens and one dwm screen. It almost worked. If I comment out the first DISPLAY entry in openbox-session, and then, in DISPLAY 0.0, do DISPLAY=0.3 dwm & I get a dwm session. However, every time I go to another display, to get back to dwm, I have to open a new tag (their version of workspace.)

I find (and this is just me, of course,) that with the 4 monitors, I don't really have much use for tiling. I have a browser full screen in one window and second browser and 3-4 terms open in the next--that's the screen where tiling would be most useful.

My main shortcuts are movement and resizing. I have shortcuts for the browsers I use, but that could just as easily be done with dmenu which has its own shortcut. For me Mod4+arrow snaps something to top, bottom, left, or right.

Oh, I also have tint2, but only on one of the monitors, which is the only one where I need to know what's open. I'm not a big fan of lxpanel, (but have only used it as default when setting up Lubuntu for my wife's friend.)

Is your tile.sh up anywhere?

(Hope that no one was bored by my overly lengthy explanation.)
 
It's so boring, and I'd feel like an idiot taking it at work with others watching wondering what I'm doing
Upper left monitor, full screen firefox, watching the help desk. Upper right monitor chat utils, irssi and pidgin, and usually a window open ask I ask someone for help or they ask me--and sometimes, of course, just complaining--we have offices in different places, so this is mostly the other sysadmins in NJ, and sometimes sales and techs on different floors.

Lower left is where I have another browser, usually chrome, though lately playing with xombrero--though sad to say (probably not a surprise to Rod, who knows me), my life is so boring that there's no need for privacy--so NSA can find that I go to these forums, a couple of Linux ones, and gasp--Oh, that I read the UK's guardian for news--hrrm, maybe I better use it more. :) Anyway, it takes up top to bottom then about 3/4 of the way from the left, with the 1/4 remaining of the right being used for terminals. The browser in that window is usually open to various other company specific web pages (probably not allowed to take pictures of them anyway). The terminals are usually in the various servers I'm working with. That's the one running tint2. (And once again, thanks for many years ago, before its advent, when you fixed p

Lower right is mostly thunderbird, and if using VirtualBox for a Linux or Windows VM to do something I haven't gotten working in FreeBSD. I use thunderbird because I need the filters, and the only filter I've seen for mutt and imap that looks doable would require me making changes on the mail server, and if I break that, people might become annoyed. I could download it to my local machine and filter it there, but I find I'm lazier in my old age.

Wow, talking to Rod and Vermaden again--reminds me when I was young, and we were using 4.x. Good to talk to both of you again. I see I have both of you mentioned on my fluxbox/openbox page at http://home.roadrunner.com/~computertai ... xopen.html. Vermaden for the post he made that I've mentioned and Rod for the help he gave me with pypanel before the advent of tint2

The only concession I make to eye candy is set the background of the three monitors that don't have a full screen to steelblue rather than the default black.
 
scottro said:
It has four discrete video cards, NVidia's, and I was only able to get it working as zaphod rather than any kind of twinview or xinerama. This was actually fine with me, due to the way it was set up.

When I first started the job, back in September, I could only get it working with fluxbox, and even then was having issues. I was using (after breaking X by trying to do it by hand) nvidia-settings and it was a bit peculiar--only showing three monitors, but after some dragging around, I finally got it working. (If you want a copy of the xorg.conf, PM me and I'll send it along--it was configured through the nvidia-settings GUI, to my shame.)

It took some playing around to get it working in openbox. It can be done in .xinitrc but I wound up adding lines to /usr/local/bin/openbox-session.

So, my openbox-session has
Code: 
DISPLAY=:0.1 openbox &
DISPLAY=0.2 openbox &
DISPLAY=0.3 openbox &

above the last two lines (the comment to run openbox and the actual exec line).

I've also tried having 3 openbox screens and one dwm screen. It almost worked. If I comment out the first DISPLAY entry in openbox-session, and then, in DISPLAY 0.0, do DISPLAY=0.3 dwm & I get a dwm session. However, every time I go to another display, to get back to dwm, I have to open a new tag (their version of workspace.)

I find (and this is just me, of course,) that with the 4 monitors, I don't really have much use for tiling. I have a browser full screen in one window and second browser and 3-4 terms open in the next--that's the screen where tiling would be most useful.

My main shortcuts are movement and resizing. I have shortcuts for the browsers I use, but that could just as easily be done with dmenu which has its own shortcut. For me Mod4+arrow snaps something to top, bottom, left, or right.

Oh, I also have tint2, but only on one of the monitors, which is the only one where I need to know what's open. I'm not a big fan of lxpanel, (but have only used it as default when setting up Lubuntu for my wife's friend.)

Is your tile.sh up anywhere?

(Hope that no one was bored by my overly lengthy explanation.)
Click to expand...

Thanks for this explanation, I now understand what zaphod setup means ;)

Here is my ~/scripts/tile.sh script (unfinished): http://pastie.org/8957778

... but todays I use ~/scripts/aero-snap.sh a lot more, here: http://pastie.org/8957784

Here are my bindings for ~/scripts/aero-snap.sh script:
Code: 
% grep -C 3 ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml
    <!-- AERO -->
    <keybind key="W-Left">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh L</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="W-Right">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh R</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="W-Up">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh T</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="W-Down">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh B</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="W-Escape">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh C</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="W-C-Up">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh TL</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="W-C-Down">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh BL</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="W-A-Up">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh TR</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="W-A-Down">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh BR</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="W-C-Left">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh TL</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="W-C-Right">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh TR</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="W-A-Left">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh BL</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="W-A-Right">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>~/scripts/aero-snap.sh BR</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

scottro said:
Wow, talking to Rod and Vermaden again--reminds me when I was young, and we were using 4.x. Good to talk to both of you again.
Click to expand...
Same good feeling here mate, reminds me of good old bsdforums.org times ;)
 
For anyone else running across this thread, I should have explained. Using zaphod, named for Zaphod Beeblebrox from the Hitchhikers Guide, means that each monitor is a separate desktop. (Not entirely separate--one desktop recognizes that say, firefox is running on another desktop, but you can't drag windows between monitors.)
 
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