I'm asking this question here as I'm hoping there are a good number of people running Fluxbox and/or XFCE4 on Slackware - and someone might know the answer. But if I'm wrong about it, maybe I should move the question to the Software forum?

I run Fluxbox as my main WM - and I've recently discovered that Slackware ships with, among other things, the xfce4-mixer - as part of XFCE4. In XFCE, when the mixer is started, it creates an applet in the toolbar panel in the top right corner of the screen - or I'm not sure what exactly they call it. I was wondering if there is a way to get the mixer to do the same in Fluxbox - so that it displays a speaker icon, which, when clicked, brings up the mixer. When I start xfce4-mixer in Fluxbox, I get the actual mixer, but no icon/applet in the system tray - so when I close it, it disappears completely.

SImply add it to your ~/.fluxbox/startup script somewhere ahead of the exec line.

I am running fluxbox 1.3.5
Dont know about xfce-4 mixer
but i do know that kmix works fine on the fluxbox taskbar

Craig Miles

Thanks for the suggestion. I know how to start software automatically when fluxbox starts. However, as per my OP, xfce4-mixer doesn't add an icon in the system tray - so it disappears completely when I close it.

Thanks Craig. I don't have any KDE stuff installed normally - but I'll make a note and install the required libs and kmix to test it.

Oops... My mistake, I misread the question.

As Craig, I too am using kmix and it works fine from the Fluxbox toolbar - but no experience with xfce4-mixer.

Bump...

Since I had misread that, I have been searching online for a solution, but have found none. So I'll bump this back to the top to see if any Xfce/Flux gurus want to chime in.

I did find several forum posts, including this one that all say that the xfce4-mixer cannot be used in the tray as earlier xfce-mixers could, so not looking good.

I do not use KDE but I install the basic KDE stuff for compat, and have been using kmix with the Fluxbox tray since KDE 3.x. A good option if you installed KDE base.

This is a shot in the dard, but did you follow it with an ampersand when you added it to the Fluxbox startup file, like this:

Alternatively, though it's cumbersome, don't close it, just minimize it.

I didn't follow it with the ampersand, as I tried it from a terminal window. Surely, if when run from a terminal window, it doesn't create a systemtray icon and it disappears when closed - it won't make any difference if I start it from the Fluxbox startup? Or am I missing something?

Thanks astrogeek for the extra info and research. It's not looking good - but as long as I know there is now way to make it work.

I dont know answer to your question, I am using hot keys(shortcut buttons) on my keyboard to control volume, mute, and pause, work great, just a suggestion.

Thanks number22. I've been using for years alsamixer - and I'm pretty happy with it. But sometimes I install laptops for "regular" users - and although I like Fluxbox, having a little volume icon/applet in the systemtray would be nice.

You are welcome.

I also found a BSD forum post that indicated it might be due to missing or moved icons for xfce4-mixer. But I looked on an up to date -current box here and I found a full selection of xfce4-mixer icons under /usr/share/xfce4-mixer/..., so that did not look like a problem to me.

From what I read in other places it appears to me that xfce4-mixer itself does not support the tray placement (but I admit that I do not know how that normally works in any detail).

Just when I was about to give up on this one, I stumbled over the following post, which lists not one, but three simple volume icon applications which should work with Fluxbox:

http://forums.bodhilinux.com/index.p...ox-volumeicon/

I've only tried the (aptly named) volumeicon so far - which incidentally is in SBo already. The other two are available in SBo as well.

So far volumeicon is great - it can be configured to mute on click, or to open a volume slider, or to open alsamixer, or to increase/decrease volume when rolling the mouse wheel over it. No funky dependencies or needing gstreamer to work. Exactly what I was after.

Beware - it looks like the server which is hosting the volumeicon download might be misconfigured as the file is corrupted after download. I think it might be defaulting to an ASCII download when using Firefox. However, if done with wget, it seems to come down OK. That slowed me down for a while.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hey thanks!

I was not aware of those either. I use fluxbox on all my systems, but as I said my use of kmix is a holdover from KDE 3.x. But I have rid myself of most other KDE-isms so I think I'll try these out while it is on my (limited) mind!

What I did was to use volumeicon with xfce4-mixer. Volumeicon offers a simple slider for the main control - and I've configured it to open the full xfce4-mixer on middle-click (I think one or both of the others have their own full mixer though).

xfce4-mixer does not appear in the tray because it is included in the xfce panel as an xfce4-panel plugin (it's not in the tray when running xfce either). You may, however, have your xfce4-panel running under fluxbox if you want to (...but would you? ).