Openbox on Fedora Configuration How-To

To continue the search for a pretty desktop, I have recently spent some time looking for themes for those lesser-used desktops that actually require some configuration from the user. My first thought was to try FVWM2, having seen the pretty screen shots from FVWM-Crystal. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come natively on Fedora, and having tried a few of the packages on the internet, that didn’t seem to get me anywhere. My next step was to try openbox. Precisely what the difference is between fluxbox and openbox no-one seemed to really be able to tell me, other than openbox strives for a more minimalist approach than fluxbox.

This is then my attempt to make a pretty desktop using openbox. Here’s the screenshot:

Installation

All of the packages that are used you can get quite happily from the fedora repository.

yum install openbox: This will install openbox, and make the necessary changes to the login-screen for it to work. That done, log out, and log in again. You will be faced with a plain, and rather boring grey screen, with no icons, and nothing that says how you get it to DO anything. When you right-click on the desktop, you will see a simple menu. One of the options will be “Terminal“. Click this and choose “Gnome Terminal”.

Now, we need to get something slightly more useful, so for this we will need some tools:

yum install tint2 obmenu obconfig tintwizard lilyterm yakuake conky

That done, open another terminal, and lets try starting a few things:

tint2: This is the simple menu bar. This will make changing windows and seeing everything that sits in the system tray much easier.
yakuake: This Kde App starts a drop-down terminal from the top of the screen. It makes the simple commands that are easier to run from a command-line much easier than running a terminal every time.
lilyterm: A simple terminal editor (to find it’s options, right-click in the window). I find the colourising, and the transparency works much better, without hogging the resources that gnome-terminal seems to do.
obmenu: This is the openbox menu editor. Start this, and let us add a few useful things to the menu, to make it more usable.

Using Obmenu

If your anything like me, then you start maybe a handful of applications directly from their icons on the desktop every time you log on. These are the things you need to hand without having to fuss moving down through the menu. Obvious things are Firefox, Lilyterm, Nautiuls File Manager, and Banshee.

It’s a very simple to use menu editor. The top set of menus that you see are the menus that form the drop-out menus on the openbox menu. Click on the “Openbox 3” menu, add another separator below the one that’s already there. Below that, add the following menu items using the “New Item” button, NOT the “New Menu” button (if, like me, you click on it by accident, selecting the item and pressing the delete key will remove it.)

Create the following menu items:

Label: Firefox
Action: Execute
Execute: firefox

Label: Lilyterm
Action: Execute
Execute : lilyterm

Label: Banshee
Action: Execute
Execute: banshee-1

Label: File Manager
Action: Execute
Execute: nautilus –no-desktop
NOTE It is important to add the –no-desktop, otherwise the first time you start nautilus, it will take over your desktop and add icons, which looks ugly, and stops the openbox menu working

Label: Connect To…
Action: Execute
Execute: nautilus-connect-server
This allows you to connect to Samba/ftp/other network shares.

Setting the Background
If like me Grey is not your colour, then your going to want to set the background to something a little prettier. The quickest, and easiest way is to use a program like feh.

feh –bg-scale /path/to/my/background

Getting it all to start automatically

As you may already have worked out that starting all this by hand would be a pain in the neck. Handily, Openbox allows you to start things automatically from a script. Create the new file:

~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh

And copy the following into it:

# Run the system-wide support stuff
. $GLOBALAUTOSTART

# Programs to launch at startup
#hsetroot ~/wallpaper.png &
xcompmgr -c -t-5 -l-5 -r4.2 -o.55 &

# SCIM support (for typing non-english characters)
export LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.utf8
export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM
export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
export QT_IM_MODULE=scim
scim -d &
sh ~/.fehbg &
# Programs that will run after Openbox has started
(sleep 2 && tint2) &
conky -q &
batti &

You can add any other programs that you want to start automatically to the end of the file. Don’t forget to add the “&” after each one!

Conky’s Configuration
Conky is the funky little system monitor that sits on your desktop. I stole the config almost complete from the Ubuntu How-To Forums.

To get this working you may need to change a few of the options for your system. For example, you may need to set /var/log/messages as readable for your user. There are many ways of doing this, I pumped for the quick, dirty, and security-unsafe option of chmod a+r /var/log/messages run as root. I also had to change the name of the network adaptor to one that matched my machine, especially as it’s written for eth0, and my machine uses wlan0.

Other Little Additions

• You may want to install “batti” on laptops in order to monitor the battery life
• Some items set to autostart using gnome will autostart automatically under openbox. You can find their .desktop files in:~/.config/autostart.

Final Notes
This is a very quick and dirty way of setting up the desktop, but then I’m not a fan of things taking too long. I hope this helps others get to access the power and flexibility of openbox.

Thanks,

~BlackXanthus