About
Often known as Hieronymus online, this is my Web 2.0 life, in almost real time.
Accounts
Newer posts are loading.
You are at the newest post.
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
October 27 2010
Openbox Time
Ooops - I forgot to mention in my Blue Period post what Window Manager I have been using. I had the post about 90% done and started playing with some of the cool new buttons in the MovableType post editor and things went haywire and I lost most of it :( I guess I forgot to add the window manager back in.
In keeping with the The Arch Way, I decided to stay away from big heavy "Desktop Environments" like KDE or GNOME and explored some of the lesser known and more lightweight Window Managers. I settled on Openbox. Not sure why exactly, as there are a plethora of choices, but Openbox seemed nicely compact and pretty popular with the Arch Linux crowd. And I haven't looked back really. It's pretty easily configurable, with a couple of XML files being the most prominent config files - rc.xml for most of the config and menu.xml for the right click menu. One particularly cool thing to use is a "pipe menu", where the results of a command build a menu on the fly. The very prolific Arch user Xyne has created obfilebrowser, which creates a menu based upon the folder you point it at, so you can use it like a little file browser. Another useful menu generation tool is menumaker, which you run once and it creates a menu.xml file for you. It scans all the "usual" places for apps, as well as having a few custom algorithms for finding those out of the way apps. Unfortunately, it seems to be abandoned, as I don't see any updates to it in several years, although it does seem to work okay.
Add the fairly lightweight and equally configurable tint2 & wbar and you've got yourself a very workable X Window environment.
Related articles
In keeping with the The Arch Way, I decided to stay away from big heavy "Desktop Environments" like KDE or GNOME and explored some of the lesser known and more lightweight Window Managers. I settled on Openbox. Not sure why exactly, as there are a plethora of choices, but Openbox seemed nicely compact and pretty popular with the Arch Linux crowd. And I haven't looked back really. It's pretty easily configurable, with a couple of XML files being the most prominent config files - rc.xml for most of the config and menu.xml for the right click menu. One particularly cool thing to use is a "pipe menu", where the results of a command build a menu on the fly. The very prolific Arch user Xyne has created obfilebrowser, which creates a menu based upon the folder you point it at, so you can use it like a little file browser. Another useful menu generation tool is menumaker, which you run once and it creates a menu.xml file for you. It scans all the "usual" places for apps, as well as having a few custom algorithms for finding those out of the way apps. Unfortunately, it seems to be abandoned, as I don't see any updates to it in several years, although it does seem to work okay.
Add the fairly lightweight and equally configurable tint2 & wbar and you've got yourself a very workable X Window environment.
Related articles
- Links 12/10/2010: KDE-GNOME Comparisons, Mandriva Activity (techrights.org)
- How to Easily Create a Custom Lightweight Desktop Environment (maketecheasier.com)
- Eight Reasons to give E17 a Try (jeffhoogland.blogspot.com)
