Has anyone been able to get Fluxbox or even Blackbox to work in Mandriva 2008.1? It's available in the supported repositories and used to work great for me in past Mandriva/Mandrake versions, but it refuses to start up in Mandriva 2008.1. I just get dumped back to the X login manager window.

After doing some searching, I was able to start Fluxbox by going to init 3 and then using 'xinit /usr/bin/fluxbox', although pulse audio wouldn't respond when I tried to run things like Rhythmbox for unknown reasons. I'm still not sure how to get things running from the regular init 5 login manager (still looking).

Well, it's not just Fluxbox that won't start. IceWM won't start. OpenBox won't start. Basically, everything that is not KDE won't start. I have NO CLUE what is wrong with this setup. It looked like Xorg-X11 wasn't installed, just the Xorg-Server. So I had it install that in case it had something to do with it. No change. This is pretty frustrating. I like KDE 3.5, but I would like to be able to run other Windows managers.

The only way I can get anything else to start is to go to init 3 and use xinit <path-to-start file>, but that's not helpful for using the login manager (KDM or whatever one it's using by default).

If you start fluxbox from the commandline, does it start up? If not what error messages does it show?

"The only way I can get anything else to start is to go to init 3 and use xinit <path-to-start file>, but that's not helpful for using the login manager (KDM or whatever one it's using by default)."

Never mind the last reply. Does everything looks setup correctly in KDM to start the WMs?

The error it gave if I don't use the xinit from the command line and instead use either "startfluxbox" or "fluxbox" was "cannot connect to X Server".

Everything 'looks' ok in KDM (i.e. fluxbox appears in the list of window managers as does any others I install using Mandriva's installer). But when I try to start fluxbox through KDM, the screen goes black followed by the Nvidia startup logo and then KDM reappears.

I'm simply not sure why it can't find the xserver. I did a lot of searching on Google and most people got that error when xorg wasn't installed. Here, xorg-server appeared to be installed. I added xorg-x11 but it didn't make any difference.

When I did start fluxbox with 'xinit /usr/bin/fluxbox' from init 3, it appeared to come up ok and the mandriva program menus were present, etc., but if I tried to load up something like Rhythmbox, it complained it couldn't find the pulse libraries. Other programs like Firefox came up OK (minus the Mandriva weird 'line' issue in the input boxes (see another thread about text box glitches with Mandriva and Firefox3).

Otherwise, KDE 3.5 seems stable as a rock on Mandriva. All my hardware appears to be detected and function. I wish I could say the same about OpenSUSE 11.0, where I get random freezes in both KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.0 (doubt it's the window managers, but rather something else in SUSE with my system).

Like I said, other Window managers like IceWM won't start either. The only thing I've noticed compared to other suggestions out there for other people that had a similar error with fluxbox was to make sure 'startfluxbox' was in their .xinitrc file. On my system there is no local .xinitrc file. The one in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc file says

exec /etc/X11/Xsession $*

The only xsession scripts I can find on my system appear to be for openbox and it doesn't run either so I'm not sure xinitrc is even being used.

Now /etc/X11/wmsession.d/ does exist and contains the window manager configuration files that apparently are used. There are:

01KDE
07IceWM
16fluxbox
25openbox
29drak3d

The fluxbox one currently is set to:

NAME = Fluxbox
ICON = fluxbox.png
EXEC = /usr/bin/fluxbox
DESC = Windowmanager based on the original blackbox-code
SCRIPT:
exec /usr/bin/startfluxbox

Thanks for any help. BTW, it might be a week or so before I can reply again as I'm going on a trip soon.

I finally found out why Fluxbox wouldn't work with Mandriva 2008 and 2009. If you have it set to use Compiz 3D effects in the Mandriva "Configure Your Computer" panel (under desktop effects), then Mandriva enables Compiz as soon as you click login (i.e. before the selected window manager or desktop starts). Thus, the Compiz window manager was already running when Fluxbox attempted to start and thus it refused to start since another window manager was already running.

If you set Mandriva to NOT use desktop effects then Fluxbox and IceWM, etc. will all work fine again. I assume if I want to have compiz running ONLY for KDE and/or Gnome, I'd have to do some manual editing for those entries or something and bypass Mandriva's control panel setting. It also explains what happened to the La Ora window manager in Mandriva 2009 (when it starts Compiz first, it uses its window manager instead with KDE or Gnome).

Very good follow-up with this, VonMagnum. I didn't think of compiz would be holding it up either. I hardly use compiz anymore.

Thanks for letting us know of the solution.

Fluxbox works best with two separate displays (I have a two monitor system) while KDE 3.5 to some extent (depending on preference) and DEFINITELY KDE 4.x (which doesn't even set up a 2nd task bar or app launcher if you use two independent displays and no way to moves apps over which leaves only the shell with "DISPLAY=:0.1 ProgramToStart" to start 2nd monitor programs) so that created yet another difficulty even IF I wanted to lose Compiz, which I do not as it's total eye candy that even makes my two Macs look primitive.

So for now I ended up making a couple of scripts to copy single, dualview and twinview versions of my xorg.conf script over top of the main xorg.conf file and have "startx" combined with .xinitrc to start up fluxbox instead of KDM. So if I want to use Fluxbox, I go to the root terminal (CTRL-ALT-F1) and login as root and do an init 3 (to shutdown KDM and X) and then run my "dualview" script for two separate monitors and then login under my regular user name and do a startx which then starts up my slick two monitor fluxbox using a green matrix theme and a green 2D style Cairodock for launching my most common programs (at least for the moment; I'm thinking of setting up a docked applet launcher instead in the future).

When I logout of fluxbox, I then just run "twinview" from the root terminal again to switch it back before I shutdown and/or run init 5 to bring KDM back up from which I can run KDE 3.5, KDE 4.x or Gnome.

I'm sure there's probably a more ideal method to somehow get KDM to do all that for me, but I don't know enough about it and it's hard to get that kind of information on it so it'll have to do for now. This also avoids the Compiz issue so I can keep it running with KDE and Gnome.