Hi I am making an effort to move away from KDE to using Fluxbox full time. However one thing I find difficult to live without is pretty desktop icons and colourful wallpapers. (Yes I know the real hardcore guys will ask why I need these (or why I even really need a GUI at all) but really - after comming away from KDE after 5 years, I do need at least some eye candy I can relate to.

Anyway I found out about iDesk for fluxbox, which pretty much gives me all of the eye candy I am looking for.

I have been trying to follow the guide:

http://idesk.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Idesk-usage

But I haven't been very sucessful. (Indeed this has been made more difficult as the author appears to be a non native English speaker, which makes his instructions just that tad more difficult to follow).

Well anyway as far as I can make out I have to put a plain textfile in my /home/knx1967/directory called .ideskrc. (although first thing being first, can anyone please confirm that this is what I have to do?)

Second this file should have the following syntax:

The first thing that struck me was the hex colour codes; but then I found a colour chart calculator on the web, so that isn't such a big issue any more. However there are still a few things in this that are confusing me. First the original author's font choice in the above example is Tahoma - and I already know that Tahoma is an MS TTF font. I don't have anything beyond the default fonts that come with KDE installed (specifically I don't have any MS core fonts installed) so what would anyone here recommend as a good substitute for Tahoma?

Additionally in this section:

What would be a good default value for the transparency? I need things to be sharp and clear, though I don't mind a little transparency for fun and for good effect. So is 100 a reasonable value to begin with?

In any case what exactly does this transparency refer to? Does it refer to desktop icons, or does it refer to actual Windows? Or is it in reference to fonts only?

In the following section after this there is this entry too:

But again, what does this mean? How high and in what position is the 'Snapwidth' (and what is it?) if set to 55 and is SnapHight 100 a good value to choose or not? Is this describing a grid that icons allign to - or is it in someway describing the positions of the icons themselves? Once more, what are good default values, if I want to lay things out on my desktop in roughly the same way I can in KDE? (my screen is set at 1024x768 BTW).

Lastly from this file there is this section:

I know it might seem like an obvious question to some, but what is "FillStyle: FillHLine"? What is being filled, and what particular style FillHLine refer to? (and also, what are the alternatives?)

Finally in this file I have set my background values as follows:

(Which is just an example for the moment). In doing this I have set my initial background to /usr/kde/3.4/share/wallpapers/blue-bend.jpg - although I have also told this software that there are additional wallpapers in /usr/kde/3.4/share/wallpapers/ and that it should select from these and randomly change the wallpaper every 20 minutes. Have I done this correctly?

Lastly in this guide there are instructions on how to actually create desktop icons.

To do this it seems you must create a folder within your home directory called .idesktop and in here you must create the fluxbox equivalent of what appear to be KDE .desktop entry files. Again it is not perhaps quite as clear to me as it should be what is required here?

The .desktop entry files for fluxbox can it seems be called anything, providing they end in a .lnk extension (such as home.lnk) So in this example a file is created called 'home.lnk'

This file contains the following text:

A few questions I have about this are as follows:

1) Can the Icon: line be a link to any icon, located anywhere on my computer?

2) Why in this example has he got two exec lines for his home directory? Is this required, or is he simply demonstrating that this file can cause two seperate directories to be iopened simultaniously? What if all one wanted to open was their home directory? Wouldn't this be trimmed down to just one line - as in:

And last but not least with this specific file, there is an entry that gives the position and size of the icons:

But what I find odd about this is that it isn't using standard icon sizes; as in 28x28, 32x32, 48x48 and so on. As my prefered icon size is always 48x48, what would be a good equivalent value to add here? Also how are the x and y coordinates of my screen determined? If I wanted my home directory on the top left of my screen where I would normally expect to find it, once more, what would be a reasonable value to assign here?

The major drawback to all of this is that it seems i must create by hand a .lnk file for each and every icon I wish to create. This seems as though it will be very laborious - with perhaps the possibility that I might have to write as much as 20 or 30 such files by hand. (I may not want them all on my desktop all at once - but I often chop and change the icons on my desktop - and I use about maybe 20 or 30 apps in total on a regular to not so regular basis, so having these available for ready placement on my destop would be extremly useful.

To this end I don't suppose anyone knows of a repository of .lnk files anywhere containing common desktop applications that the majority of people tend to use most often - or perhaps you might have a few of your own you can share? I know it will still take some work editing them to reflect the correct icon/directory paths and so on - but somehow editing them seems a much less daunting prospect than having to sit down and write them all out by hand.

I know this is a lot to ask, but if I can get some clear concise instructions, I will probably mail the auhor of this guide with any clarifications and/or corrections that I can come up with - so that hopefully the guide will be easier for others to follow in the future too.

So any hints tips or advice or clarification of any nature that anyone can offer in this regard would be very much welcomed.

Fluxbox as a desktop rocks BTW - although it does seem to take a bit of extra effort to get it set up just the way you want it.

I apologize, but I just don't have the time and energy to read your whole post

Fluxbox doesn't mean that you can't have great wallpapers and desktop icons, and you can do it MUCH more simply than with all this wild config stuff from idesk.

I run Flux on several desktops, I have cool wallpapers, and if I didn't like clean desktops, I could also have rox handle the icons- it does it very well and with minimal setup. Search for rox on the Slackware forums for info on setting it up. It's a very nice file manager that supports application associations with filetypes and can also do desktop icons (and maybe menu bars, I can't recall.) Also look for "aterm transparency" on Slackware forum if you don't know about aterm. It's a great terminal with tons of options including transparency.

Flux is one of the quicker, easier wms to set up. I prefer to have everything in menus and nothing but my wallpaper showing, and I can set up a new Fluxbox in just a few minutes and I'm no expert with it.

An easy way to get started is to take a them that you like (only the buttons and bars really count in the theme, but if you find wallpaper you like, no problem) and use your own wallpaper. That way you can mix and match your bits until you've something you like. You can find a load of themes for fluxbox/blackbox on themes.freshmeat.net.

Crazy configuration is correct. But one thing I have found is that when it works, iDesk works really well! (It's actually good fun and super easy to move icons around - and thy move in a nice neat animated way too!)

So I guess you could say I have made some progress in understanding it.

The only thing I need to know now is how to ensure that I can get the executable to start (as in /user/bin/idesk) after X and fluxbox has started? It needs to start *after* X and fluxbox has started, as clealy if it can't find a fluxbox instance to manage, it will tend to crap out.

As for Rox, I'm already using Rox as my file manager - and so far the only irritation I have found is that I don't like the constant Window resizing every time you enter a new folder and that perhaps the icons are a little too small. (I have very poor sight, so I like my icons to be very big and bright and obvious). I know I can hit the zoom button to scale the icons up - but they are still not quite large enough - and besides which having to hit zoom three times on every folder you enter can become a little anoying. But there are minor irritations - so hopefully I can find a way to resolve these too.

As for your other tips, I will certainly bare them in mind.

GJ

Ok sorry to bug you folks, but I only have one question about idesk left.

You see I am trying to run a command, whereby I can mount a cdrom drive - and then raise a rox window where the CD is mounted.

I tried doing this a couple of ways. First I did:

Then I tried:

(If you are wondering what these are they are the equivalent of iDesk .desktop entry files).

But unfortunately neither of them worked. (The first exec. line in the initial example does work on the CLI though).

Clicking on the icon does mount the CD however - it just doesn't run the second command to raise a Rox window at /mnt/cdrom.

Does anyone know of a possible way to resolve this?

GJ

iDesk used to be good until the current developer took over. I'd say stop trying to get iDesk to handle the mounting and have Rox do it. Rox can also do your desktop icons which makes mounting easy too but thats another story. Just have Command[0] open Rox at the CD mountpoint and it'll ask your if you want to mount it.

You can start it in your .xinitrc and if you put & on the end of the line it will stay around as a background process.[/QUOTE]

You can set the options not to resize the window, and you can also select which icon size you prefer. Right click in a window, but not on any file, and you'll see the menus. You can choose large icons and set a high-limit on resizing or even choose "never resize"

Hi, thanks, that is really helpful - but now I have a much more significant problem to deal with.

I added the entries to xinitrc and xsession as described in various guides here, with the following syntax:

But unfortunately doing this simply caused the system to go crazy, the harddisk would just grind endlessly (I thing it was swapping for all it was worth) and X would never fully start.

I did a few tests and found that it didn't matter what I added to xsession or xinitrc, if for example I only put

Or

the system would still go crazy and my desktop would never fully load. I tried again optionally adding and removing the '&' at the beginning and end of both fluxbox and (eg in the last example above) gkrellm - but it still didn't work.

Instead of using xinitrc and xsession, I decided to use the startfluxbox script (by removing everything from both of these except one single entry called 'startfluxbox'). I then went to my home directory and opened /.fluxbox/startup and added the entries as desribed in that script. Which is exxentially the same as above.

But again the system just went bizzerk.

So I am completely out of ideas. It seems that unless I only have one item during startup (which is my window manager - which in this instance is fluxbox) listed in my x startup scripts x will never fully load.

However the crazy thing is, if I let X and fluxbox start on their own, they start really quickly - and providing I start idesk, gkrellm and vncserver after the desktop has fully loaded, they run really smoothly and without any issues. (One thing I did notice though, is that often xinitrc and xsession are written in the form of a bash script - which mine is not - so I'm not sure what effect that would have).

At a guess (since it is the only guess I have) what I think might be happening is that (as this system is fairly limited on resources) it just can't take all of this software being started all at the same time - and that it is really just too much for it to handle.

So possibly the only remaining solution is some kind of system start up script (as opposed to an X start up script) that somehow waits until after X has fully loaded (or for a predefined time period after it is first called, so that at least X has enough time to load), which then loads these applications in sequential order, one after another (as opposed to all at once) again at predefined time intervals (perhaps for example 20 seconds after each other - although preferably it would just wait until one app had quit loading before it started loading another).

The problem of course is, that I don't have the slightest clue how to do this.

I know it is a big thing to ask, but can anyone give me an example of any kind of how this might be achived?

If the system can't tolerate doing all that stuff at the same time (which is what it sounds like) then just write a script and execute it from rox or a terminal window after fluxbox initializes.

Yes that is what I thought too - but that is exactly what I don't know how to do.

As I said if someone could give me an example of a system startup script (something that perhaps I could put in my /etc/init.d) that would work under those circumstances, that would be really very helpful.

GJ

I'm not talking about a startup script. I just meant a script you can execute manually once fluxbox is running.

All you have to do is pretty much make a copy of your .xinitrc and take out everything that isn't the few lines you showed in your posts. Just execute the apps you want with & at the end.

I didn't see what distro you're using. If you're using the bash shell, you can do something like:

#!/bin/bash
idesk &
gkrellm &
vncserver &

Try this:

In the .xinitrc, end it with the command startfluxbox. Then in the ~/.fluxbox/startup file add the other commands.

I think fluxbox is nicer then kde, even without Idesk, just some changes with the style and your done (I think so)

~/.fluxbox/startup is the file to run programs before starting fluxbox
this is where you should add the
and similar things

I used this simple HOWTO when I played with configuring flux the first time
it covers the basics of iDesk/Rox , feh and basic flux configuration
also while you're at it, you might want the eye candy (and usefulness) of conky to display simple statistics on your desktop

You can start the apps in different orders by using the sleep command. My guess is that idesk may be causing most of the problems in this case, not only does it load icons, but it also wants to mess about with backgrounds. Try the following to start idesk:
(makes idesk wait 2 seconds after everything else has started before it starts)

Also, I have gkrellm running in the slit, so

would work to do this (-w option for withdrawm mode)

Check out the man page for more options.

Happy fluxing.