fluxbox!

[Collins]

On Sat, 16 Mar 2002 22:17:11 -0700 Collins <erichey2 at attbi.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Mar 2002 12:11:56 -0800 Ken Moffat <kmoffat at drizzle.com>
> wrote:> Just found fluxbox, a blackbox knockoff, which if very cool.
> Small,> fast, nice features. Anyone else tried this? (is this old
> news?)> 
> 
> I'm emerging it now.  It appears to need even more of the gnome
> crapola than I already have installed.  Info on google says it's a
> debian-developed entity.
> 
> Will let you know what I think.

It's quite usable.

1) On gentoo the install is painless (there's an ebuild already
available).  YMMV with install from tarball and getting all the
dependancies.  I haven't looked for RPMs.

2) Had to do a bit of puzzling to figure out how to run it.  I wound up
cloning startxfce.  If you need the scripts, let me know.

3) It's a very minimalist window manager.  Tiny task bar at the bottom. 
Arrows on the left slect one of four desktops,  Arrows on the right
scroll through screens on the current desktop.  The current screen name
appears in the middle of the taskbar.  If the screen is minimized, you
click here to restore it.  Middle mouse click on the desktop brings up a
workspace/desktop selector popup; right mouse click brings up a menu
popup which has been populated with things fluxbox knows about, ie
several browser choices, sylpheed (interestingly enough), aterm, but no
OpenOffice (alas).

4) Like most gnome things, skins are big.  The styles selection on the
menu gives you a choice of a lot of window decoration and color combo
styles.  I'm not much impressed, but some people just love eye candy.

5) There are a number of configure options in the menu, but I haven't
looked at them.  I haven't found any trace of a help or documentation
function, nor did I find much when I did the google search.  Maybe you
have to rely on Blackbox for any info.

If I didn't already have xfce which does all this and more I might be
interested.

Enjoy,

-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area - WWTLRD?
Gentoo_rc6-15 2.4.17 - xfce + sylpheed + mozilla
(temporarily testing out fluxbox)