hosed fluxbox with upgrade attempt

Forum: X and Fluxbox
Topic: hosed fluxbox with upgrade attempt
started by: ezagent

Posted by ezagent on Nov. 20 2007,03:50

I have a picture frame laptop PII running DSL that I tried to upgrade fluxbox on. Using synaptic I was running into dependency problems. Finally made what I thought was progress but rebooting ended with an error message, startx no such command.

I realize this is not real specific as far as version number etc., if that bothers you, don't reply...

From the shell I used apt-get to install x windows, now I have xdm as a display manager. My picture frame works fine but apps that depend on what I assume is gtk do not, e.g. Firefox.

This whole thing started because I wanted the picture frame to boot up with Firefox in a second workspace. My thought was the upgraded fluxbox with the remember feature might be just what I need.

Any help on what to do to get unhosed? I'd like to figure out how to get rid of x-window-system which isn't working, get back to at least the default fluxbox I had and then maybe try again to upgrade.

Help.

Posted by mikshaw on Nov. 20 2007,12:57

I can't really help with uninstalling, since I don't know anything about debian packages. Normally MyDSL packages aren't recommended on a traditional harddrive install, but that may be the easiest way to get X running again. Otherwise, you'd either need to manually copy the original X files from a DSL iso or reinstall your system.

You really did go overboard with this, though. Fluxbox can be upgraded without the need for anything else. The trick is to compile it yourself. DSL doesn't have some libraries that are enabled by default in Fluxbox, so they will need to be disabled. Do "configure --help|less" to see what options there are to configure.
If I remember correctly, the following works on DSL with gcc1-with-libs (you can compile it in RAM from a liveCD if you don't want to install the gcc package permanently):
./configure --disable-kde --disable-gnome --disable-xft --disable-randr

Posted by ezagent on Nov. 20 2007,16:41

Quote (mikshaw @ Nov. 20 2007,07:57)

You really did go overboard with this, though.

I wiped the disk. Live and learn.

Posted by curaga on Nov. 20 2007,16:49

Xft was added in 3.4

Posted by mikshaw on Nov. 20 2007,20:18

But i think the Xft headers are not included in gcc1-with-libs, so the build fails. I looked at the config.log from my last build of Fluxbox 1.0.0 and it said I used these options:
--disable-kde --disable-gnome --disable-imlib2 --disable-xft
Imlib2 was disabled by default in previous versions, but i guess they activated it in 1.0

Posted by ezagent on Nov. 21 2007,03:27

I put TinyFlux on my picture frame. That has Fluxbox 1.0.0 which is nice but I'm running into problems with things as simple as putting unclutter on the machine, and Toshiba Utilities for Linux will be more than a challenge.

I'll monitor this forum because DSL with Fluxbox 1.0.0 leaves nothing to be desired.

Posted by curaga on Nov. 21 2007,16:27

The latest Fluxbox in Mydsl is 0.9.14. Is there something special in 1.0 that you need?

Posted by ezagent on Nov. 23 2007,22:58

I went back to a version 3.? of DSL. Setting up the machine with HD install takes not much more than ten minutes. I cfdisk, reboot, install to HD, modify /boot/grub/menu.lst, enable apt, install unclutter, feh, toshutils... after doing GNU utils upgrade.

Doing the GNU utils upgrade seems to introduce problems with the Control Panel and DSL Extension Panel not operating as expected. I click to open, maybe they open, maybe the buttons in the applets work, mostly they don't. Not sure what that's about.

The only thing still troubling me is cron. Not setup by default. When I use apt to install cron and attempt to use it, the cronjobs don't execute. Not sure why.

As far as upgrading fluxbox to 1.0.0 - I gave up. Tried several lightweight distros. Back to whatever version I have burned on a disk, maybe 3.2 - with 7matrix it looks great. Thought I wanted to be able to boot the machine with feh running a slideshow in workspace 1 and firefox standing by in workspace 2. No longer matters. Just want to fix cron and figure out why my control panels are flaky.