Want newer Fluxbox

Forum: Window Mangers
Topic: Want newer Fluxbox
started by: kyleneitzel

Posted by kyleneitzel on Dec. 03 2006,15:53

Greetings helpful community-
DSL works awesome on my old laptop. I would love to be able to use the pixmap based themes for Fluxbox but I believe I will need to use the latest Fluxbox, which is not included out of box. I DL'ed it and ran the dpkg on it. Now it resides in the /opt/.fluxbox directory.
How do I go about enableing the latest version? From what I've read there isn't an upgrade or update for Fluxbox- you just install and use the new version.
(I tried using DSL-N but the USB ports don't work so I went back to DSL. DLS-N allows pixmap themes.)
Any help appreciated. As a newb, I wish I had more to contribute other than questions! Once I get this thing tweaked I'll be sure to document how I set up this old Dell Latitude CP on the forum. Thanks again.

Posted by cmanb on Dec. 03 2006,16:59

There's a fluxbox extension in the WM_App repository. See if that'll give you what you want.

Otherwise, I think you might try enable-apt, and apt-get the newest fluxbox and try from there.

How are you running DSL? USB embedded? LiveCD? Hard drive install?

Posted by cmanb on Dec. 03 2006,17:05

and check this out
< forum topic >

Posted by mikshaw on Dec. 03 2006,17:58

The latest Fluxbox versions, 0.9.15 and 1.0 RC, are in my opinion broken, due to an incomplete security fix which drastically changes (and breaks, in some cases) the way it handles themes. Because of this, the latest Fluxbox package currently available through myDSL is 0.9.14 (uci). This 0.9.14 version provides pixmap support, but only for xpm. Adding png and jpg support required Imlib2, which would increase the size of Fluxbox by an unacceptible amount.

If you are running a traditional harddrive install, you can simply overwrite the /usr/bin/fluxbox executable with the one in the 0.9.14 package and it will be upgraded and available without any additional effort, and without the need to remount the myDSL package with each boot. 0.9.11 and earlier myDSL packages may not be so convenient (although i haven't tested it), since they were built to use a custom config directory.

Posted by Greengrass on Dec. 20 2006,08:57

As a n00b to DSL, (not Linux/Unix in general) it took a while to find mikshaw's post on 0.9.14 and then it took half a day to get it installed and working. Hint: after you replace /usr/bin/fluxbox witht he 0.9.14 version, you need to reboot. I found that re-starting the window manager wasn't sufficient. The desktop icons disappeared!

I also had problems with MyDSL. (DSL 3.1) It would connect to distro.ibiblio.org and download the .info portion, but it would not download the .uci file. I had to use a web browser to get the download (/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/mydsl/uci/) and then manually run mydsl-load to mount the .uci file.

If anything interesting crops us on themes with .xpm's I'll post it.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Dec. 20 2006,19:44

You could just restart X (next time) - not sure how the wm restart works (though if it was just the icons, you might be able to enable them in the menu).

Posted by Greengrass on Dec. 20 2006,20:23

Quote (^thehatsrule^ @ Dec. 20 2006,14:44)

You could just restart X (next time) - not sure how the wm restart works (though if it was just the icons, you might be able to enable them in the menu).

I tried to restart X both with the WindowManager -> Restart and by WindowManager -> Exit and then doing a startx from the command line. In both cases the icons were not displayed. The only way I could find to get them back was a reboot.