I'm having a hell of a time transitioning over to fluxbox and could use some help here.... I'm Gnome Handicapped and thus kinda lost right now. I cannot set a background for the life of me... bsetbg and fbsetbg both say they don't have a window setter or something. The different one's I've come across seem to have alot of deps.... I just want a wallpaper is all.... :-) Just built a new LFS and I would really like to stay away from deps from here on out.... Tired of it. Deps make me want to scream after the last 2 days. I don't understand why this isn't a default capability of Fluxbox. Didn't think it would be that limited in scope as far as the base package goes. I gotta have a transparent terminal as well... Can't really figure that one out either. I have rxvt and xterm... I'm sure rxvt will do the trick (was able to -bg black... Whats the transparent switch name?) I've just been looking at some of those themes and I'm jealous already... It looks like crap right now. I've been for quite awhile now and I just want someone to hold my hand or even pick me up and carry me, if it wouldn't be too much trouble....... Some good links or straight up help would be great!!!! Thanks all....

Oh.. and how do you get this clock off of military time? thanks again....

what's the line your using with bsetbg?

mine looks like:

and that's in ~/.fluxbox/init

as far as terminals go, eterm and aterm will allow you to have transparent backgrounds through switches (which means, i don't know squat about rxvt - sorry).
also not sure about the military time... heh heh, i never even noticed that it was on military time, but i don't use fluxbox that often....

edit: correction noted and fixed on fbsetbg.... my bad....

Sweet! Your the man... I was missing the quotation marks.... You mispelled "fbsetbg" by the way.... O.k... Yea, I did a ./configure and make on the latest windowmaker and stole wmsetbg, wmsetup, man pages and all the libwraster's..... I'll be damned if I'm going to install another window manager just to have a background..... This is something that Fluxbox should take care of.... Seems very short sighted if you ask me....

O.k.... One down.... Two to go....

Any one?

O.k.. after I RTFM, (ie- man 3 strftime), I came up with:

session.screen0.strftimeFormat: %l:%M

For the 12 hour clock.. Thats a lower case "L" by the way...... I don't know if it works or not because it's 6:30am..... My previous variable was 24 hour format but blanked the first number if the value was a 0..... We'll see at noon.....

O.k.... Two down.... One to go.....

Any one?

And screw rxvt... I don't think it's capable...

[exec] (Aterm) {aterm -tr -trsb -bw 0 -cr black -title Fluxbox\ Terminal -fg white -sb -sr}

Thanks all for your help... Just need to figure out how to change the highlight color, set the cursor color to transparent or none and change the font to something bigger and I'll be good to go.... She looks really sharp now.... Kinda hard on the eyes but nice...

Sounds like you've got aterm doing what you want. But, for what it's worth, rxvt CAN do transparent terminals, but the capability has to be compiled it (you can still make it transparent or not if you compile it in, but if it's not compiled in, no transparency). Slackware's rxvt is not compiled this way.

It isn't the window manager's job to set backgrounds, so we have tools such as fbsetbg, Esetroot, xv, etc.

It certainly should be. Thats kinda like buying a new computer and then finding out it doesn't come with a sound card. Really assinine.... I don't care. I stole wmsetbg so it doesn't matter. It's only dependent on one set of libs and I made a nice binary of it to keep around.... And as I'm sure your aware of, but over looked, fbsetgb is NOT a window setter. It's just a script that relies on something else to set the background. Thats why I couldn't set a wallpaper in the first place.

If your used to Gnome and KDE, Fluxbox can really lock your brain up at first. Enough to where alot of people don't want to deal with the learning curve....Threads like these are kinda cool if someone happens to stumble upon it down the road who has the same problems, so I'll add my latest fix to ~/.fluxbox/menu (I forget about man pages sometimes....)

[exec] (Aterm) {aterm -tr -trsb -bw 0 -cr \#255255 -fn 10x20 -title 'Fluxbox Terminal' -fg white -sb -sr -g 85x25 -bg black -sl 30000}

-bg black took care of the highlighting issue (not seeing the text underneath) Has to oppose -fg as far as color goes
-g switch changes the terminal size
-tr enables transparency
-sb -sr puts the scrollbar on the right
-trsb makes the scrollbar transparent. Really nice effect
-bw 0 eliminates the border (well, almost anyway)
-cr is the cursor color. You can use a few basic color names or specify a color palatte code.
-fn sets a new font size
-fg sets the font color (fore ground)
-title is self explanitory
-sl This is Necessary... Lets you scroll back how many ever lines you specify to check output (The default is LOW!!!)

Still haven't figured out how to make the cursor transparent. Not so sure it's possible actually. Using a dirty green color right now... A blinking cursor would be nice as well, but I'm not so sure it can do that either. Well, anywho. Think I've about wraped it up.... Thanks again

I sort of agree with your "it certainly should be", but essentially window managers merely handle the dimensions, location, and decoration of windows...anything else is just an extra. Even a menu, although common, is not really necessary for a window manager. I think it's just become common because just about everyone who uses a graphical desktop likes the idea of a menu. Personally I'd kinda like the menu (or at least the contents of the menu) to be independent of the window manager...this would save having to create a menu for multiple window managers. Anyway, this is beside the point. Thanks for pointing out my fbsetbg flaw...i forgot it was just a wrapper.

I don't think you can make the aterm cursor transparent without some modifications to the source code, but I could be wrong. Another useless but cool aterm option is fade. This allows the contents of an aterm window to dim when you put focus on something else.

Yea, It has become common place and even expected from people to have a way to set the background; thanks to explorer, gnome and kde..... But, really, thats not asking a whole lot.... It only added about 1.5 mb to the total install size of windowmaker...... Fluxbox should do the same... Why make it hard on people to use your software? Doesn't make much sense...

1.5mb added to windowmaker may not be much, but that's nearly twice the size of the entire Fluxbox source archive.
I'm thinking perhaps they should mention the need for something like feh or Esetroot if you want to set a background image, rather than add a whole extra application to the package.

No, it's more like buying a new computer and finding out your coffee cup doesn't fit on the CD tray.

Hey... Cool... You do that too? Thats the whole reason why I have 2 drives.... It works perfect!!!!

Heheh. True.
Some of us want a window manager not a whole desktop environment and thus we use fluxbox. I for one appreciate the fact that it doesn't come filled with a bunch of features I MIGHT sometime want. That's why I use it. If you don't like it. Why are you using it? Anyways. I just edit my background through my styles files in /usr/share/fluxbox/styles/.

Who said I didn't like it? I love using Fluxbox... Get off your high horse people... It's fine, really. Thats good that you like gradient or solid color backgrounds, but I don't.... This has been taken care of for weeks. I know your not that bored, are you?