Fluxbox Install

Installing Fluxbox (and other goodies) on Fedora Core 4

This how-to will guide you through installing fluxbox 0.9, torsmo, and Adesklets on FC4. This how-to is aimed at the new linux user.

Fluxbox development version: (http://fluxbox.org/version-0.9.php) Amazingly, the dev version is better than the stable!

Let’s start on installing fluxbox from source move yourself to a pretty terminal window and move to where you put your downloads:

[root@ohs-311-a ~]# cd downloads
[root@ohs-311-a downloads]# tar -zxvf fluxbox-0.9.14.tar.gz
[root@ohs-311-a downloads]# cd fluxbox-0.9.14
[root@ohs-311-a fluxbox-0.9.15]#
[root@ohs-311-a fluxbox-0.9.15]# ./configure –enable-kde –enable-gnome

The –enable-kde and –enable-gnome will just have fluxbox use kde’s and gnome’s icons

[root@ohs-311-a fluxbox-0.9.15]# make 
[root@ohs-311-a fluxbox-0.9.15]# make install

This is MUCH quicker than kde or gnome because its minimalist and small. We’ll hold off on screenshots since mine is finished et all

Now we must make the FC session manager have an option for fluxbox when you loggeth ineth:

[root@ohs-311-a fluxbox-0.9.15]# nano /usr/share/xsessions/fluxbox.desktop

Now there are a lot of config files that fluxbox looks at. For your personal fluxbox settings, most of the stuff is in your home/.fluxbox folder here you have a lot of stuff:

[root@ohs-311-a .fluxbox]# ls

backgrounds fbrun_history fluxaqua icons init keys lastwallpaper menu menu.bak slitlist startup styles

[root@ohs-311-a .fluxbox]#

Some of these things i’ve added post-install. Your mileage may vary. As you may guess, the menu file is for the right click menu settings. The startup specifies many settings for when you login to fluxbox. The styles folder contains any fluxbox styles you download(you have to download and extract it their first). Beware, any styles in there only show up in your user styles, no one elses. If you want them everywhere move the styles to /usr/local/bin/fluxbox/styles(warning: this directory is made when you follow these directions for compiling, if you specify somewhere else or use Gentoo's emerge it willl differ)

Now: styles. Fluxbox.org has some in there themes section, then also has a link to freshmeat to get more (http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/962/) I've downloaded Goth-v1.0 which i will now proceed to put in my personal user styles folder

[root@ohs-311-a ~]# tar -zxvf Goth-v1.0.tar.gz

This will, in this case, extract a background and a style folder.

[root@ohs-311-a ~]# mv styles/ background .fluxbox

So, lets customize. If you look at ~/.fluxbox/startup, you'll get a lot of options of what to start up

Customize the menu in .fluxbox/menu

[root@ohs-311-a ~]# nano .fluxbox/menu

The basic setup is:

[exec] (aterm) {aterm}

run menu name terminal command

Will be doing more with startup later. First we have to install torsmo and adesklets:

[root@ohs-311-a ~]# tar -zxvf torsmo-0.18.tar.gz
[root@ohs-311-a ~]# cd torsmo-0.18
[root@ohs-311-a torsmo-0.18]# ./configure

Again, you can run ./configure ---help to set some custon configs, i'm lazy, and am gonna do standard

[root@ohs-311-a torsmo-0.18]# make
[root@ohs-311-a torsmo-0.18]# make install

Go to http://adesklets.sourceforge.net/desklets.html and get what you like, for us we're gonna use calendar and weather. Extract those and you'll get a folder with a conf and python file, run it by

[root@ohs-311-a Calendar-0.18]# python Calendar-0.18.py

Note: you may have to install the latest python from the web

Now, let's make adesklets and torsmo start when we log into fluxbox. Lets go to ~/.fluxbox/startup and edit it:

[root@ohs-311-a ~]# nano .fluxbox/startup

You add the programs that you want and then put an & at the end of each, and a new line for each.

That should be all. More help can be found at:

http://adesklets.sourceforge.net/doc/en/

http://torsmo.sourceforge.net/readme.php

http://fluxbox.org/docbook/en/html/

Part Two

Let's go a bit farther. We're going to add root-tail(http://www.goof.com/pcg/marc/root-tail.html) to our setup. Root-tail is, in it’s simplest form, a log viewer. The GOTHCA here is it only reads text files, so you couldn’t(unfortunatly, seeing as it would be awesome) run the top command. Also, a wee bit of config file editing to get that special “homie” feeling.

Root-Tail

so once you’ve aquired root-tail from the aforementioned website, we need to extract and install it:

[root@ohs-311-a downloads]# tar -zxvf root-tail-1.2.tar.gz
[root@ohs-311-a downloads]# cd root-tail-1.2 
[root@ohs-311-a root-tail-1.2]# ls
Changes debian mkdist root-tail.c

config.h Imakefile README root-tail.man

[root@ohs-311-a root-tail-1.2] #
INSTALL 
xmkmf -a 
make
make install
make install.man

Pretty simple. The xmkmf -a is just like ./configure, it compiles and looks for programs and such. Just a different name. All of these commands are extremely quick, so it shouldn’t take long. Now let it run and see what it’ll do.

In the readme, there's an example of what to do. I modified that to my own liking:

[root@ohs-311-a root-tail-1.2]# root-tail -g 800x250-220-30 -font fixed /var/log/messages,green /var/log/secure,red,'ALERT' /var/log/Xorg.0.log,orange,'Xorg’

So, the -g command tells it what size, the geometry (in this case 800x250) and where on the screen (x,y)(-220-30). the /var/log/messages tells it what log file to look in, the green tells what color that should be. This applies to the other 2; also the ‘ALERT’ and ‘Xorg’ tells root-tail what to display for what log is telling you this bit of info that’s being presented.

a lot of log files are in /var/log, but i’m sure there are many more. Do an inkernet search to find the location of your favorite log, and have it show up on your desktop

DONE

Now for playing with config files. For now, we’ll just leave it as it is.

Those are pretty much all the files I messed around with. As an extra bonus heres how you configure the adesklets desklets:

Go into their folder, open up the config.txt file, and have at it.

That should be helpful in case you wanna change the zip code for weather. I'm not sure if i mentioned this, but you can move around adesklets by right clicking on them and selecting move

For example, i added a different icon for firefox in the yab desklet by downloading a .png and moving it to the yab/icons folder