The X FeelForum: X and Fluxbox Topic: The X Feel started by: accolades Posted by accolades on 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 Posted by adssse on 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. Posted by mikshaw on 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. Posted by adssse on Aug. 17 2005,14:03
Thanks for all of the info, I never realized. How would I find out whether an app uses gtk1 or fltk? Posted by mikshaw on 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. Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 18 2005,17:03
If you type:whereis appname and then ldd /path/to/appname it should tell you if any external libraries for the toolkit of choice are needed like gtk or fltk Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 18 2005,17:04
Also,The newer version of fluxbox in the mydsl repository will give you a snazzier look and feel for the window manager while still remaining light and fast Posted by Noob on Aug. 18 2005,19:40
Just a comment, but why not put the newer version of Fluxbox on the next release of DSL?
Posted by cbagger01 on Aug. 18 2005,21:24
Technically, the new version is not considered "stable", although it seems to work just fine for everyone that uses it.DSL has the latest "stable" version of Fluxbox. Posted by mikshaw on Aug. 19 2005,14:22
The newer version is also quite a bit larger than the stable, and until 0.9.13 it was also quite a bit slower.
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