DSL Talk

First test of fluxbox 0.9.12 ended in slight disappointment. The actual compile was a little annoying until I finally got imlib2 using the proper version of freetype and fluxbox finding them both without an ld wrapper.
After successfully building and moving it into DSL I realized that the addition of Imlib and libFreetype is probably not the best idea. Together they are 750k stripped, which is nearly the size of fluxbox itself. I'm not sure it's worth it just for the ability to add png and jpg images to your interface (xpm is already supported).

Another feature is a Tab action which allows you to jump to specified tabs.

For the last three years I've used SuSE Linux as my crutch, since it makes some annoying configurations very easy....winmodems are supported out of the box, YaST is a very easy GUI configuration tool for most systems files...

but I ran into something tonight that really made me angry. I have been installing gimp from source for the last couple of years without trouble, but with the latest 2.2.2 things went bad. When the configure told me I had to upgrade glib I thought that was reasonable, so I did....then tried upgrading gimp again. I was told to upgrade glib. Hmmm...I just did that. I checked my pkgconfig path, and found it included packages installed both from packages and source. Just to make sure I also installed glib with prefix=/usr, so my packaged glib was also overwritten. Still gimp tells me I have to upgrade glib. I tried to install the latest pango and atk, failing because they want the glib that I have just installed 4 times, followed by ldconfig and a reboot.

I wasted some precious time yesterday, but ended up with what I hope will eventually evolve into a conveniently-organzed theme switcher for Fluxbox. I'm not talking about just changing styles, but changing visual settings of other applications as well (maybe icon sets, too). Since I use a lot of text based applications, it's particularly useful for me to modify the foreground color of aterm and the bash prompt to blend with the chosen fluxbox style.

Currently I have a system set up in my liveCD backups which allow me to chose just before loading X which theme I want. If I do nothing, Fluxbox will look like this black&white screenshot

Being a person who likes to waste countless hours with Linux tweaks, I naturally have to create a custom prompt or two....and of course they are big and obnoxious, yet useful at the same time.

My current prompt is one I've been using for many months, and probably won't remove in the near future.

updated 15 dec 2004 - mikshaw

Here is a list of available Fluxbox commands/actions.
These commands are not the same as the shell commands
entered into a "run" dialog such as fbrun. They are
instead commands built into fluxbox to accomplish tasks
which may not be available from the menu.

So I built the latest fluxbox this past week, and it seems to be working great in DSL.
The 0.9.10 extension was sort of a rushed job, and I found a couple of glitches in it (my fault, not a fluxbox bug). I've got a few configuration tweaks to do for the extension, and I could put it together tomorrow....except I started thinking about making a new style to showcase some of the new features....

If it weren't for the fact that I spent the last 24 hours researching every possible option for fluxbox/init I might have already made a decent style....but such is life.