fluxbox newbie question

Forum: X and Fluxbox
Topic: fluxbox newbie question
started by: kingfish600

Posted by kingfish600 on Dec. 25 2004,05:33

I have been using knoppix and DSL linux for a few months now and made my first linux install yesterday (fedora core 3)on a computer i'm giving my dad for christmas. Fedora comes with gnome but I really like the look of fluxbox used in DSL I have found a expermental rpm for fluxbox and am really tossing around the idea of changing it to fluxbox I'm hopeing someone will tell me how hard it is to set up.

Thankx

Posted by mikshaw on Dec. 25 2004,19:57

It is impossible to tell how hard it will be unless we know things such as your level of skill and whether or not you boot directly into a graphical environment.

Otherwise I'd say it's quite easy to set up. If you boot into text mode, all you really need to do after installation is change the last line of ~/.xinitrc to "fluxbox". If you use a graphical session manager rather than startx, i couldn't tell you what needs to be done....it depends on what session manager you use (xdm, gdm, kdm), and I have no experience with any of them.

Configuration choices are entirely up to you. It's initially set up with a usable config, but there are lots of things you can change to suit your taste.
Check out the online docs for all the info you need:
< http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/docbook.php >

I highly recommend using the 0.9.11 devel version rather than 'stable'. It's as stable as any flux version to date, and has a mountain of features added. The only thing sacrificed is a little bit of speed, but it's still much smaller and faster than Gnome.

Posted by kingfish600 on Dec. 26 2004,00:09

Thankx I may give it a try after I get off work. The rpm I found is for fluxbox 0.9.9-2 I guess that's as new as it gets for now. As to my skill level I'd say i'm a linux beginer I have used dos command lines(big differance with linux) and can edit configuration files(I have done that with fedora) other than that I'm trying this stuff for the first time. It took me about an hour to figgure out yum I'm looking foreward to setting debian sarge up as soon as it's stable then I can play with aptget.

Posted by sindhugshankar on Jan. 12 2005,14:41

Hi,
I have downloaded fluxbox-0.9.11.tar.gz from the link < http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/fluxbox/fluxbox-0.9.11.tar.gz > and have followed the steps given in
< http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/docbook/en/html/c98.html >
after giving the tar command when i go to configure it using ./configure i get warning which says
" 'missing' script is to old or missing"
and an errot\r which says
"no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH"

pls help

Posted by mikshaw on Jan. 12 2005,15:06

DSL is not a development environment...you don't have many tools available with which to compile more than the simplest applications.
You'll save yourself a lot of trouble by doing one of the following
1) If you have a harddrive install, you could try 'apt-get fluxbox', although the last time I checked there wasn't yet a debian package of flux-0.9.11.
2) Try the pre-compiled fluxbox-0.9.11 extension at
< http://www.ibiblio.org/pub....wm_apps >

You could also try adding the gcc1.dsl extension and see if you can compile fluxbox with that....I'm pretty certain it will ask for additional libs and headers though.