Back to Openbox

Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

I wrangled with a framebuffer system on my fastest machine for a few days, even going so far as to customize a PKGBUILD for mplayer that uses only framebuffer output, and relies on no dependencies aside from expat.

To be honest though, a framebuffer system on a faster machine is only partly interesting to me. I need it for my Thinkpad because the driver isn’t working, and I use it for my other Thinkpad because the screen is damaged and because that driver doesn’t work either. 🙄

But the video card in this Inspiron has more than enough muscle to run Compiz (or whatever it’s called these days), so a framebuffer-only system seems like … underkill.

So I reinstalled Openbox on Saturday night. The results are what you might expect.

In an effort to cross all boundaries I installed xcompmgr too, and coupled some of the finest in terminal applications with some fundamental eye candy. That should keep just about anybody happy. 😆

I do see a small niche filled by running an oversized terminal like that with dvtm in it. There are enough high-quality console-based applications available to warrant a “palette” of three or four, running as a desktop window.

Of course, after a bit, the space and arrangement and convenience become a bit … overweening. After all, a tabbed terminal emulator running a tiling window manager which can run inside itself, filled with applications (some of them tabbed too) all on a graphical desktop. … You’d need to have your brain plugged directly into the Internet to need that much “space” at a time.

On the other hand, I’ve known some office techies who might find that useful. One tab per “node” and a clean arrangement of network and process monitors would help to keep an eye on their ducklings. It’s a little too much for me on my lowly home network, but I’m sure others could find it helpful. 🙂

10 thoughts on “Back to Openbox”

  1. K.Mandla Post author

    I used to have a real addiction to conky, but after a while it wasn’t really useful to me beyond a desktop clock.

    I could give it a try again though. It’s been a while. …

    Reply ↓
  2. Dieter_be

    Hey, there is a bug in your markup. Many of your link elements are closed twice(in pretty much all of your posts).

    Eg they are like this. the ‘/’ shouldn’t be there. This breaks the layout in at least liferea (and maybe others too).

    PS: wmii rocks :))

    Reply ↓
  3. Jeff Flowers

    OpenBSD lacks framebuffer support on the PC, so I run X on my machine, but I still try to keep it command line oriented. The only X applications I install are Evilwm, Urxvt, Feh, Scrot, Firefox, and Conky (I used to run Xcompmgr but it conflicts with Conky).

    A somewhat current screenshot is here:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeff-flowers/3367282592/

    I hardly ever need to run multiple console applications but if I did, I think that I would have to investigate using GNU Screen. I’ve seen some very impressive Screen setups on the Arch Linux forums over the years.

    Reply ↓
  4. Cedric

    Hello K.

    I’m just passing by for a request ,
    I’ve been on your site many times ,
    But I do not understand all the content ,
    Can you put a translation widget on it ?
    it would be a good thing for your habituals French readers ,
    I’m coming often here to know how to work with the best ingredients for my computer (scaleo p ) but a very bad machine for ,
    I have still a 486 and it works better with linux ,
    But my Scaleo (fujitsu siemens was made to do good works with Windows , but it getting better with Linux , for the moment Ubuntu ,
    Waiting for a respond ,
    don’t moove your so good works here.

    Thanks Cedric

    Reply ↓
    1. K.Mandla Post author

      Done! And thanks for the suggestion. I hadn’t ever seen a translation widget, but I found one and it’s on the right now. Apprécier!

      Reply ↓
  5. colonelcrayon

    I saw the aliases, but do you have any other elinks configs you can post? That would be great!

    Reply ↓
  6. Pingback: Translate this blog « Motho ke motho ka botho

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s