INSTALL fluxbox guide

Hi everyone,

This is a small guide for those that are running RED HAT 9.0 (RH 7.3 and others should be working the same) and want to install and use FLUXBOX as their new W/M.


1) download source tarball (tar.gz) of fluxbox to home directory
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/f...-0.1.14.tar.gz

2) open terminal

2a) tar zxvf fluxbox-0.1.14.tar.gz

2b) cd fluxbox-0.1.14

3) ./configure

4) make

5) su

6) enter password to become root

7) make install

8) touch /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/fluxbox

9) chmod +x /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/fluxbox

10) pico /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/fluxbox

add these lines to it (exclude START and END line!):
-------------------------------------START
#!/bin/bash

exec /usr/local/bin/fluxbox
--------------------------------------END

11) press CTRL + x

12) press y

13) press ENTER

14) exit

15) mkdir .fluxbox

16) exit

17) logout and log back in choosing fluxbox under 'Session'
---you might even want to set it to default because you'll love it


Hope this helps!

For 0.9.4+ sources, you needed to do an ./autogen.sh before step 3).

hey , My problem is i dont know how to load it onto my laptop. i am on a separate computer. thanks

hi there,

what do you mean by you don't know how to load it onto your laptop. If you're actually running RH 9.0 you shouldn't have any problems at all following those steps.

And I don't really get the meaning of the phrase: "I am on a seperate computer" - do you mean your laptop is not connected to the internet?

awaiting for response ...

i have two computers. a desktop and a laptop . my desktop has the internet . my laptop just has red hat 9.0. since i am a newbie i am not familar with all of the linux terms. my desktop is able to download fluxbox, but whenever i try to open it , it is in win zip . i dont know how to get the flux box from my desktop to my laptop and be able to get flux box working. thankyou for your time and patience

hi icunow,

according to my "little how-to-guide" you can find the link on step 1:

download it to your desktop computer (windows system I believe). It's very small (around 500KB) so you should have no troubles putting it onto a floppy diskette.

After that, take that floppy to your linux system (laptop in this case) and just mount your fdd, acces the floppy, copy the file to your system. Then you can just follow the rest of the steps above and you should have no problems getting fluxbox to work.

If u need help mounting just simply do a search on these forums and u shall find the answer

or to make it simple for you

mount /mnt/fd0

assuming fd0 is in /etc/fstab

for copying files you could simply do

cp filename ~

assuming you're in the directory of the file that you want to copy
-> it will copy the file to your home directory (/home/whateverusername)

hope this helps

All right i burned fluxbox onto a cd-r , now i put the cdr in my laptop and boot up , right? now do i do all those promts that u gave me in th grub boot loader or not , where do i do all that stuff. i am sorry but i dont know very much about linux, if you can help i would be very greatful , Kristoffer

I don't want to be rude, but wouldn't you rather first want to get used to gnome or kde before switching to any lighter window manager? According to your posts you seem not to be familiar with the "basic" commands of linux.

I advise you to read through the online documentations/manual(s) of RH 9.0 (http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/) to get familiar with the basic of it.

After that it wouldn't hurt to read the documentation of FLUXBOX (http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/).

Maybe then you're ready to switch. If you don't know much of what you're doing in linux, it would be much more trouble for you to get used to fluxbox (as you will want to edit the menu files, change theme settings, etc..etc..)

Just my opinion.


p.s: what runlevel are you on? 3 (text) or 5 (graphical) ?

hey , red hat is just to dange slow. it takes forever to do anything, so i've been told is with my w/m . thats where i heard about fluxbox, being able to make redhat run faster. you see i would like to upgrade my 150 mHz cpu to somthing faster but i have a gateway solo 2200 laptop and cant find any faster cpu's for it. first of all i would like to find out what are my options for upgrade but cant find a manual or nothing. if you know of a place where i can find a manual or a cpu i would be thrilled beyond thrilled , kristoffer

hey , i am able to pull up the file for fluxbox on my laptop. but it has a bunch of files and i dont know which one will install fllluxbox , kristoffer

ok i have fluxbox loaded onto my home directory, and i figured out how to get a terminal open. when ever i type in that stuff at the top of this page in the terminal it won't load. do i have to do something with the fluxbox file in my home/directory : say open or load something . thanks kristoffer

Where exactly are you up to with it? - have you extracted the tarball yet? etc..

wow, there I'm gone for about a day and lots of things happened

I'm glad you were able to figure out how to open up a terminal

that means you're basically at STEP 2 according to my mini-how-to-guide - pretty much follow the steps there and I hope you really copied the tarball to your home directory

if that's the case nothing else should go wrong - again you should just read through th online manual I posted earlier here in this thread to get basic knowledge of RH.

It's not easy to help someone without that person knowing what he'she is doing sometimes...so just let us know what you've done so far and we should be able to guide you through this!

how do you extract tarball. is it in one of the flluxbox files
thanks

the tarball is the compressed file you download which contains fluxbox itself...a tarball (tar.gz) is in a sense the equivalent to a .zip file in windows....
so when you download the tarball from fluxboxs site, you go to step 2a in the guide above to extract it, and then continue with the step by step..