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Topic: The X Feel

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accolades

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Joined: Aug. 2005

Posted: Aug. 17 2005,06:34

The user interface of applications run in Fluxbox look like the old "X11" applications (ie. ugly) Is there a good way (perhaps libraries from KDE or GNOME?) to make the interface look a little more "modern"?

I hope this makes sense.
Tim

adssse

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Posts: 505
Joined: Mar. 2005

Posted: Aug. 17 2005,13:28

I believe you can use KDE or GNOME but it will hamper your performance as I believe fluxbox is more efficient.

Also you can edit how fluxbox looks. You can get the whitebox.dsl extension from the repository and use that to customize your fluxbox style. Also here is a great page to help you make your own. It covers everything you will need to know to get started creating your own style.
http://www.fluxbox.org/docbook/en/html/fluxstyle-man.html
Another option is if you like one of the current styles that comes with DSL but just want to tweak it, you can find these in /usr/share/fluxbox/styles and the backgrounds in /usr/share/fluxbox/backgrounds. When you have created your file, you should place it in /home/dsl/.fluxbox/styles and it will show up in the styles menu.

Other than that I dont really have any experience getting KDE or GNOME working.

mikshaw

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Posted: Aug. 17 2005,13:54

Depends on what you means by "user interface". Changing your fluxbox style, or switching to gnome/KDE, will affect only the window decorations of applications....titlebar and frame.

The look of Linux applications themselves is dependent upon the widget set used when creating the programs, whether it's Gtk1 or 2, Qt(KDE), FLTK, Tcl/Tk, etc. The applications found in DSL are a mix of mostly Gtk1 and FLTK.

Gtk1 apps can be changed by switching your Gtk1 theme:
http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/923/
The theme is set in /home/dsl/.gtkrc

FLTK apps might not have the ability to be customized, but i'm just guessing.

Even if you do install KDE, it will not affect the applications in DSL. KDE can customize only the window decorations (as mentioned above) and the look of Qt applications, of which there are none in DSL.

--------------
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html

adssse

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Posts: 505
Joined: Mar. 2005

Posted: Aug. 17 2005,14:03

Quote (mikshaw @ Aug. 17 2005,09:54)

The applications found in DSL are a mix of mostly Gtk1 and FLTK.

Thanks for all of the info, I never realized. How would I find out whether an app uses gtk1 or fltk?

mikshaw

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Joined: July 2004

Posted: Aug. 17 2005,14:20

I'm not sure if there is an "official" method beyond reading the documentation of each application, but if you look at the app's interface you can make a decent guess. Most widgets have a uniform look within the widget set, at least if they have not been themed. Sometimes the app's name can also help....FLWriter uses FLTK, gPhone uses Gtk, and Xcalc uses standard X widgets.

All of the GUI scripts that Robert has written for DSL use a set of FLTK widgets displayed through the use of Lua script. These are currently not customizable without editing the scripts, although I've been playing around with a skinner script of sorts...so far it seems to work ok as long as a given script uses default colors/fonts/decorations.

--------------
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html

9 replies since Aug. 17 2005,06:34

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