Just finished "fighting" with my computer to get FluxBox to show up in the menu of the login manager (or whatever it is called) by switching it from MdkKDM to KDM. Now the problem is that if I try to login as a normal user the screen goes black for half a second and then returns to login manager. Logging in as root does work but obviously I'm not willing to use my computer that way. This only happens with FluxBox (version 0.9.12, compiled from a .bz2 package), other WMs work fine (both as normal user and root)...
Any suggestions on how to work this out...?

first go to a regular VT (console) by pressing CRTL+ALT+F1 (or F2 of F3)
then login as root
change to runlevel 3 with command: init 3
(this will cause X to stop, as well as the KDM to stop)
if a prompt doesn't appear then press enter a few times.
logout as root, then log back in as your normal user.

as a normal user edit your .xinitrc file (note the period before the filename)
example: nano .xinitrc

add the line exec /usr/local/bin/fluxbox

(remove any other lines in the file)

save and exit

back at the prompt type startx
if X starts w/ fluxbox then there is somthing wrong with the way
KDM is installed / Setup...see the help info at


docs.kde.org

if X fails, then there is somthing wrong w/ the setup of X or fluxbox (permission wise)

as the user trying to run fluxbox, from the console

You need to set up your ~/.fluxbox environment for users existing before fluxbox was installed, and this script (included with flux install) does just that.

Fluxbox then SHOULD start normally after the first run as above.

he's right

Thanks for the help.

Here's what I did:

In console as root I typed "init 3"
When the login prompt appeared I logged in as a normal user.
Then I typed "startfluxbox" and I got the following:
/home/juha/.fluxbox/startup: line 12: @pkgbindir@/bsetroot: No such file or directory
/home/juha/.fluxbox/startup: line 47: /home/juha/@pkgbindir@/fluxbox: No such file or directory
/home/juha/.fluxbox/startup: line 47: exec: /home/juha/@pkgbindir@/fluxbox: cannot execute: No such file or directory

Does this mean that it tries to look for the commands in a wrong place...? Shouldn't it be like /usr/local/bin/"command here"...?


And taxtropel: I couldn't find a file called ".xinitrc"...

what reply (if any) do you get from this command -
echo $pkgbindir

It appears that the startfluxbox command set your environment right, but the start script seems to be flakey. Like a variable in the startfluxbox script wasn't defined properly. Is this an official Mandrake pkg?

Changing the path(s) in the ~/.fluxbox/startup script may make it work, you can find the path to the files using the locate or slocate command and change them in the script. Example from my machine -
the path would be /usr/X11R6/bsetroot



you could also enter these lines into a term (as user) one line at a time
This is a quick and dirty hack that depends on everything being in your path, so ymmv

If that doesn't help, post the entire text of the startfluxbox script and I'll be happy to try to fix it the 'right' way.

That echo -thing didn't do anything but an empty line...


But that code part really did something... FluxBox now works when logging in as a normal user. Thank you for your help, gbhil.

Only problem now is that I don't know how to configure FluxBox (the desktop icons and visuals etc), but that's a whole another story and will hopefully be resolved with a few hours of studying (like all other "minor" Linux-problems, I guess)...

Great. I'm glad I could help a bit.