¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Previously.

Now I’m writing my posts in Markdown @ Emacs. I hope this makes me save some time (it saved today). Wordpress is kinda distracting. Today we had big changes. Maybe extra big ones. First, let’s begin with the minor ones:

1. I’ve added some custom hotkeys to my rc.xml. These are openbox commands in essence. I intend to use another tool to launch programs.
2. I’ve runned qtconfig-qt4 to make my QT applications look like GTK ones.
3. I’ve switched pnmixer for volumeicon. Now my laptop audio hotkeys work!
4. I’ve reinstalled batterymon.
5. I replaced my tint2 panel for xfce4-panel.

Now I’ll use XFCE #

Install XFCE(4):

sudo pacman -S xfce4

Change ~/.xinitrc to start XFCE:

#!/bin/sh
#
# ~/.xinitrc
#
# Executed by startx (run your window manager from here)
if [ -d /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d ]; then
  for f in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/*; do
    [ -x "$f" ] && . "$f"
  done
  unset f
fi

# set the X cursor
xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr

# set Brazilian keyboard layout
setxkbmap -layout br

# xinit window_manager
case $1 in
  gnome) exec gnome-session;;
  kde) exec startkde;;
  awesome) exec awesome;;
  fluxbox) exec startfluxbox;;
  openbox) exec openbox-session;;
  xfce|*) exec startxfce4;;
esac

To use XFCE with Openbox, run openbox --replace while in a xfce session. You can continue from here, but I won’t. I’ll stick to XFCE for a while. This means I’ll try the Xfwm4 WM.

Notice I haven’t said how much time this challenge would last. I preferred to pick none (aka “30 days”, for instance). So I’m stopping this here. I hope you liked this mini journey.

Final notes #

Openbox was my first ‘challenge’. Probably I’ll continue this challenges series with another thing. Maybe a programming language, maybe another WM, or even a new IDE or distro. I’m not sure. But I think this is useful: for me, I can fix more these concepts and have the opportunity to train my english and to share some knowledge; for you, you can have a broad vision of a specific subject (in this case, openbox) and maybe learn or become interested about something.

Now, my final review: I liked openbox more than fluxbox. I would say fluxbox is easier to configure, but openbox kind of integrates better with any DE (or even by itself) and… bah, it is nice!!

I would say there is at least four categories of DE/WM (I prefer the bold ones):

• The heavily ones: gnome, kde, cinnamon, unity
• The balanced ones: xfce
• The lightweight ones: fluxbox, openbox, blackbox
• The power user ones: awesome, i3, xmonad, dwm (actually, never tried any of these)

If I ever need to run X(org) under a server (some people like it), I would choose openbox as my primary WM. I would feel very comfortable using it. I won’t delete my openbox repo (although it’s pretty small), but I won’t update it (anymore) either.

Further resources #

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Openbox
• https://wiki.debian.org/Openbox
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openbox
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Openbox
• http://openbox.org/wiki/Configuration
• http://urukrama.wordpress.com/openbox-guide/
• http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/openbox.xml

Thank you for reading.