simply stable plus openbox

From https://head-on-a-stick.github.io/: "SharpBang (♯!) GNU/Linux is a live ISO image that can be used to install a pre-configured Openbox/Tint2 desktop running on Debian stable."

I decided to take a look, and downloaded sharpbang-buster-backports-10.5.0-amd64.hybrid.iso. When I booted into the live system, I found a clean, simple Openbox setup:

 

Some of the apps/packages included: Thunar, Gparted, Synaptic, Galculator, Mousepad, Firefox ESR, mpv Media Player, gmrun, htop, ranger, tint2, UXTerm, rsync, and obmenu. Here's a shot showing the nicely-arranged right-click menu:

 

The SharpBang project appears to provide just about everything I want/need in a live session, without including too much other stuff. I think the idea was for something along the lines of the old CrunchBang project. I took a look at the /etc/apt/sources.list file; no surprises there:

deb https://deb.debian.org/debian buster main contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates main contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports main contrib non-free

Great job here by "Head-on-a-Stick"!! Here's the github page: https://github.com/Head-on-a-Stick/Sharpbang

 

 

worth the wait?

BunsenLabs Lithium was finally released yesterday, over one year after the release of Debian 10 ("Buster"), which Lithium is derived from. The release announcement can be found here at the BunsenLabs forums.

I downloaded the 32-bit iso (651 MB) -- instead of the full, 64-bit iso (2.1 GB) -- wrote the image to a flash drive, and booted up. I wanted to check out the live session from the smaller image even though a note at the installation page at the BunsenLabs website says, "Using the 64-bit ISO is recommended, as the CD-sized ISO has been surgically reduced in size."

Post #3 in the forum thread mentioned above contains package lists for the full image as well as for the smaller image. Some of the apps/packages included as defaults on the CD-sized image: Dillo web browser (no Firefox), Thunar file manager, GParted, Ristretto image viewer, Evince document viewer, Mousepad text editor, URxvt terminal emulator, and mpv media player. BunsenLabs, of course, ships with Openbox as the default window manager instead including one of the standard desktop environments.

I felt that the CD-sized image would be great for doing a Lithium installation, but its live session was not quite what I would have liked it to be. I'm guessing that the live session from the 64-bit image is more polished. The CD image booted fine on 3 out of 4 of my laptops; I'll keep it on my flash drive as it looks like it could certainly be used for emergency purposes, and for just playing around.

The default Welcome window contains some important information to read before proceeding:

The BunsenLabs website: https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

And, the BunsenLabs page at DistroWatch: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=bunsenlabs

oops

Oops, wrong distro.

warming up to lxqt

I finally got LXQt configured into a setup I really like. I put a shortened, vertical panel at the upper left of the desktop, and I have a little horizontal panel, set to auto-hide, at the upper right.

There's an icon for the LXQt menu at the bottom of the vertical panel, while the Openbox menu is accessible by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop.

The Configuration Center is simple but nice enough. It was kinda annoying that LXDE (from which sprang LXQt) didn't have something like it.

I put a "Leave" button on the horizontal panel; this shot shows the dialog box that button brings up:

Not a perfect desktop environment (is there such a thing?), but LXQt is light, simple, and a pleasure to use. Development on the project has come along slowly; it'll be interesting to see how the LXQt desktop looks in, say, five years.

buster lxqt w/ openbox

I've been running the Jessie-based BunsenLabs "Deuterium" on my "test" computer, patiently waiting for the Buster-based BL "Lithium" release. On a whim, I decided to take a look at Debian Buster LXQt to see how it might do on that computer.

I started out by downloading  debian-live-10.0.0-amd64-lxqt.iso and getting that onto a flash drive. The live session booted up on two of my machines, but I couldn't get into the live session using my "test" computer; booting with the Graphical Debian Installer option worked fine with that hardware, however.

Buster LXQt ships with a standard desktop setup and a nice collection of apps, including Firefox ESR, Thunderbird, PCManFM-qt, the LibreOffice suite, Audacious music player, qpdfview, LXImage, and QTerminal, among many others.

I found xfce4-screenshooter in the menu along with another screenshot tool, ScreenGrab, which seems to be a nice app. ScreenGrab gets the job done, and also it stays open between screenshots, unlike xfce4-screenshooter.

Here's a shot of PCManFM-qt, which offers a nice, commander-style split view. I found some items in the Trash. How they got there is a mystery; I didn't intentionally put them there!

I added Openbox, installed a handful of other packages, and did a heck of a lot of tinkering and tweaking -- so much, in fact, that I didn't do a good job of taking notes on everything that I did, which is something that I'm normally very meticulous about. Debian Stable doesn't really give the user a great out-of-the-box experience, but it's excellent for the "do-it-yourself" user who wants to put together a nice, customized system.

A couple more shots of my Openbox desktop, showing QTerminal, ScreenGrab, my tint2 setup, and my Openbox menu:

I like a vertical panel along the left side. For Openbox, tint2 gives me just what I need. For the LXQt sessions, I was able to get a decent left-side vertical panel -- not perfect (I wasn't satisfied with the config options available for the LXQt panel), but it'll do.

As a former CrunchBang user and fanboy, my original plan was to stick with BunsenLabs (perhaps the best Debian-based Openbox distro out there right now) for this computer, and to do a quick-and-easy installation of "Lithium" once it came out. As things have turned out, I'm happy with this Buster LXQt (with Openbox) setup, even though it took a lot of work to get things the way I like them. The thing is that while BunsenLabs is better than "straight" Debian for installing and getting to work right away, I'm never quite satisfied with the default BL setup (same goes for any distro, really!), so either way I was gonna spend a lot of time tinkering and tweaking.

Seems to me that LXQt still needs more polish, especially when it comes to GUI configuration options, but it isn't so bad, overall. It's a decent solution for those who need a light-weight desktop environment for low-performance hardware.

excellent ob/fb info

For some very helpful info on setting up Openbox and Fluxbox, see Addy's Blog -- three articles to check out are "My Fluxbox Configurations", "My Openbox Configurations", and "Automatically Generate Openbox Applications Menu".

a little more about that shutdown script

So, what is gxmessage (which I wrote about earlier, here and here)? A description:

Gxmessage is an xmessage clone for GTK based desktops. Gxmessage pops up a dialog window, displays a given message or question, then waits for the user's response. That response is returned as the program's exit code. Because gxmessage is a drop-in alternative to xmessage, gxmessage accepts any option xmessage would, and returns the same exit codes.

From: https://trmusson.dreamhosters.com/programs.html#gxmessage

From your Linux system, if you have gxmessage installed, you should have access to the man gxmessage document. Or the manpage can be found online -- see: https://helpmanual.io/man1/gxmessage/. (Arch Linux currently has that same May 25th, 2015 version of man gxmessage.)

Looks like the earliest mention of a gxmessage script for logging out of Openbox was posted online at "urukrama's weblog" back in 2007 (see: https://urukrama.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/confirm-to-shut-down-reboot-or-log-out-in-openbox/). Here's the script back then:

#!/bin/bash

gmessage "Are you sure you want to shut down your computer?" -center -title "Take action" -font "Sans bold 10" -default "Cancel" -buttons "_Cancel":1,"_Log out":2,"_Reboot":3,"_Shut down":4 >/dev/null

case $? in
1)
echo "Exit";;
2)
killall openbox;;
3)
sudo shutdown -r now;;
4)
sudo shutdown -h now;;
esac

Well, that script used gmessage instead of gxmessage, and there are other differences compared to the script I'm using now, in Arch:

#!/bin/bash

gxmessage "Shut down the computer?" -center -title "Take action" -font "Sans bold 10" -default "Cancel" -buttons "_Cancel":1,"_Log Out":2,"_Reboot":3,"_Shut Down":4 >/dev/null

case $? in
    1)
        echo "Exit";;
    2)
        openbox --exit;;
    3)
        systemctl reboot;;
    4)
        systemctl poweroff;;
esac

Anyway, I think that the great Openbox guru "urukrama" should get the credit for coming up with the script. And, who is/was "urukrama"? Along with "urukrama's weblog", I found the following:

https://www.opendesktop.org/u/urukrama/
https://github.com/urukrama

testing netinstall

I did my 2nd Debian Buster (Testing) netinstall (I was gonna hold off on doing that, but found myself with some time to kill), this time going with Openbox instead of a full DE:

I added Fluxbox; in those sessions, I'm using the tint2 panel instead of the Fluxbox toolbar, so the desktop looks very much like my Openbox desktoop:

From what I can tell, the move from Testing to Stable for Debian 10 ("Buster") could happen any day now; everything looks great!

openbox shutdown, revisited

A few years back, I wrote about the shutdown script I was using in Openbox (see: "openbox shutdown"). Lately, I've been using a similar script, but with a couple of changes that make things simpler here.

I replaced the sudo shutdown -r now and sudo shutdown -h now commands with systemctl reboot and systemctl poweroff, respectively. Not an acceptable option for systemd-haters, but oh well.

My ~/shutdown-script file in Debian Buster Openbox (again, this requires the gxmessage package) looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

gmessage "Shut down the computer?" -center -title "Take action" -font "Sans bold 10" -default "Cancel" -buttons "_Cancel":1,"_Log Out":2,"_Reboot":3,"_Shut Down":4 >/dev/null

case $? in
    1)
        echo "Exit";;
    2)
        openbox --exit;;
    3)
        systemctl reboot;;
    4)
        systemctl poweroff;;
esac

After making that file executable, I added a "shutdown" entry in my Openbox menu, using the ~/shutdown-script command.

The same script works for me in Openbox in Arch, except I had to replace the word "gmessage" with "gxmessage" in the script.

Nothing fancy, just a "Take action" message box, plain and simple:

openbox: dmenu, gmrun

I haven't decided which application launcher I like better between gmrun and dmenu. Here's a shot of my Openbox menu in Arch, with obmenu opened to show how I set up gmrun and dmenu menu entries:

But I also have keystrokes for gmrun (Alt+F2) and dmenu (Super+Space). From the "keyboard" section of ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml:

    <!-- Added by Steve -->
    <!-- Winkey+Space starts dmenu -->
    <keybind key="W-space">
      <action name="Execute">
        <command>dmenu_run -b</command>
      </action>
    </keybind> 
    <!-- Added by Steve -->
    <!-- Alt+F2 starts gmrun -->
    <keybind key="A-F2">
      <action name="execute">
         <execute>gmrun</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

The menu entries are handy to have, but I normally use the keystrokes.
 

still rockin' deuterium

A few shots of BunsenLabs Deuterium (based on Debian Jessie):

With BL Deuterium, I'm using updated versions of Firefox and Pale Moon (downloaded from their web sites), but the rest of the apps come from the Jessie repos. Jessie is the current "oldstable," which should be supported until maybe June of this year, I'm guessing. See: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianOldStable

Also, I prefer to use Double Commander instead of the default "BL File Manager" (Thunar). Beyond that, I haven't done much to Deuterium besides a little bit of cosmetic tweaking.

another arch setup

ArchLabs is very nice (see "ob-love!" and "...and, some fluxbox love"), but in the end I decided to replace it with "straight" Arch, adding Openbox and setting that up myself.

Later, I added Fluxbox. Here are a few shots of my Fluxbox setup in Arch:

openbox keybinds

The Openbox keybinds are set in the ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml file. There's a GUI app to handle this, called obkey, but you won't find it in the Debian repos (in Arch, users can get obkey from AUR).

Changes made with obkey are saved to the ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml file unless a different file is specified.

To add obkey in Debian 9 ("Stretch") Openbox, first I went to https://github.com/nsf/obkey. I clicked on the "Clone or download" button. Clicked "Download ZIP", then "Open with unzip (default)".

This gave me the ~/obkey-master directory, which I moved to ~/source/obkey-master. Then I ran the following:

$ cd ~/source/obkey-master
$ ./obkey ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml

That opened up the obkey GUI.

For my Openbox menu, I used the following command for starting obkey:

/home/steve/source/obkey-master/obkey

Here's a shot of the entry in the menu:

For a little more info, see: https://code.google.com/archive/p/obkey/

ob-love!

Yesterday I downloaded archlabs-2018-07-28.iso to have a look at the latest from ArchLabs, the Arch-based, Openbox distro that offers a BunsenLabs/CrunchBang look and feel. I ran the live session from a flash drive. Here's a look at the Welcome window on the default desktop:

I thought everything looked good in the live session. I decided to do a hard drive installation; I found the "Run Installer" option right there in the desktop menu:

The installation was probably the most pleasant experience I've had building an Arch system. The installer walked me through everything, even offering other desktop environment/window manager choices, and handled the UEFI stuff on my HP 15 notebook perfectly.

The default ArchLabs desktop is quite usable "out-of-the-box". They went with a polybar instead of a tint2 panel, but a nice tint2 option was provided. ArchLabs has some interesting menu tools; the default menu is a "static" menu, but the user can switch to a "dynamic" menu. I found a good selection of default apps and tools.

In /etc/pacman.conf, I found the following repos enabled: [core], [extra], [community], [multilib], and [archlabs_repo]. And I found aurman included, for dealing with AUR packages. I checked to see how many packages were from that [archlabs_repo]:

$ paclist archlabs_repo
archlabs-aurman 2.17.2-1
archlabs-common 1.3.5-1
archlabs-dARK 1.0-1
archlabs-fonts 1.2-1
archlabs-homepage 1.2.1-1
archlabs-icons 1.2-1
archlabs-keyring 2018.06.09-1
archlabs-kickshaw 0.6.4-1
archlabs-networkmanager-dmenu 58.2-1
archlabs-ob-autostart 1.0-1
archlabs-obkey 1.0-1
archlabs-oblogout 0.2.5-1
archlabs-paranoid 1.2-1
archlabs-pipemenus 2.6.18-1
archlabs-polybar 3.2.0-1
archlabs-screenlock 2.10.3-1
archlabs-skippy-xd 1.0-1
archlabs-themes 1.5.1-1
archlabs-user-skel 1.7.21-1
archlabs-wallpapers 1.5.1-1
b43-firmware 6.30.163.46-1

While the default setup looked good, Openbox is for tweaking; I've changed a lot of things and added some of my favorite apps. A few shots of my rearranged ArchLabs desktop:

Overall, one of the best distros I've seen. A couple of links for ya:

ArchLabs home page - https://archlabslinux.com/
ArchLabs at DistroWatch - https://www.distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=archlabs

review and tweak

Here's a fairly detailed review of BunsenLabs 2.0 ("Helium"), done by Ordinatechnic: https://www.ordinatechnic.com/distro-reviews/BunsenLabs/bunsenlabs-helium-review

I have not yet installed Helium, but I'm still running BunsenLabs "Deuterium", which is like a point release of BunsenLabs "Hydrogen". Deuterium is based on Debian "Jessie" (now "oldstable"). I haven't tweaked the installation much. I'm using a left-side, vertical tint2 panel, of course:

The author of the review above talked a lot about the lack of a "dynamic" menu in BunsenLabs; I added the LXDE Activities menu (see http://monksblog-malspa.blogspot.com/2018/09/lxde-applications-menu-in-openbox.html) to Deuterium:

Ordinatechnic also described the dmenu app launcher (see: https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/). For more info about dmenu, here's an excellent article: http://www.adercon.com/ac/node/25. Also be sure to check man dmenu. dmenu can be installed in Debian as part of the suckless-tools package. Here's a shot of it in action in Deuterium, along the bottom edge:

That's a very cool app launcher. My entry for dmenu in the Openbox menu runs the dmenu_run -b command.

Later, I added a keystroke for dmenu by adding the following lines to ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml:

    <!-- Added by Steve for dmenu -->
    <keybind key="W-space">
      <action name="Execute">
        <command>dmenu_run -b</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>      

With that, Super(Winkey)+Space starts dmenu.

I'm not sure how long I'll keep Deuterium, but the current "oldstable"should be good thru mid-2020, I'm guessing. And BunsenLabs Deuterium definitely ain't broke, so... (lol).

lxde applications menu in openbox

In Openbox, I like to set up a "static" menu by editing the ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml file manually or by using the obmenu GUI. But I do like the "dynamic" LXDE Applications menu that's used in SalentOS (website: https://www.salentos.it/); I decided to try adding that  to a couple of my other Openbox desktops.

I found helpful information in post #2 of the "Dynamic menus on BunsenLabs - a comprehensive guide" thread at the BunsenLabs forums (here's a link: https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=3387).

In the shot below, the LXDE Applications menu is added directly above the Debian menu; this is in my Openbox desktop on a Debian Stretch system that had KDE Plasma installed first (note the KDE apps in the menu):

I had to install the lxmenu-data and openbox-menu packages, then I edited ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml, adding the following just above the <menu id="/Debian"/> line:

<menu execute="openbox-menu lxde-applications.menu" id="apps" label="Applications"/>

Saved the file and did a "Reconfigure" in Openbox for the changes to take effect (might be necessary to Restart Openbox as well).

I followed the same steps for the Openbox desktop in another Stretch installation (this one has no desktop environment installed, though), except I also added the lxappearance and lxappearance-obconf packages in this case:

This gives me the "dynamic" Applications menu from LXDE as well as the "static" menu entries that I'd already set up myself (under the web browsers, file managers, utilities, etc., submenus). That's more of a menu than I really need; if I get around to it, I may trim things down and go with a simpler menu like what I'm using in SalentOS. Here's a shot of that Openbox desktop:

quick glance at helium

The Stretch-based BunsenLabs "Helium" was finally released last week. I took the live session for a spin. I wrote the image (bl-Helium_amd64+build2.iso) to a flash drive and booted up my "test" computer with it. The boot menu presents the following options:

Live (amd64)
Live (amd64 failsafe)
Live system (load image to RAM)
Install
Text based install
Advanced Options >

Under that submenu at the bottom, I found:

   Expert installer (text)
   Expert installer (GUI)
   Rescue mode (text)
   Rescue mode (GUI)
   Hardware Detection Tool (HDT)
   Memory Diagnostics Tool (memtest86+)
   Back to main menu <

Interesting. Well, I went into the live session and browsed around. Things seemed okay. There's a Welcome window that pops up at first boot:

Helium's live session ships with Firefox, Thunar, Geany, Terminator, Catfish, Mirage, xfce4-screenshooter, scrot, VLC Media Player, Xfburn, LibreOffice Writer, Gnumeric, Galculator, Evince PDF Viewer, Synaptic, GParted, and lots more.

I could access my computer's partitions with no problem via Thunar. However, when I opened GParted, I got the following message:

I clicked "Cancel" and GParted came up, but I figured it would be a bad idea to use GParted, and wasn't sure if I should attempt an installation. I'll hold off on that thought for now.

I didn't much care for the new default theming, although it does look nice enough. I prefer the old CrunchBang-style black and white, like what we got with BunsenLabs "Deuterium":

Also, I don't like that (on the tint2 panel, at the far left) the launcher icons for the web browser, file manager, text editor, and terminal emulator don't match the taskbar icons of the running apps (Firefox, Thunar, Geany, and Terminator). And, here's an instance where, even though I've got all four of those apps running, the taskbar icon for Thunar is missing:

And I don't see the point in renaming those apps -- why "BL File Manager" and "BL Text Editor" instead of "Thunar" and "Geany", for example?

Well, I've been eagerly awaiting this release ever since Debian Stretch came out last year. Not so excited about it today. I still have BunsenLabs "Deuterium" and SalentOS "Neriton" installed on my "test" computer; I think I'll keep those for now and maybe install "Helium" sometime later. Or not.

For more info, see: https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

automounting with udiskie

This is how udiskie is described here:

udiskie is a UDisks front-end that allows to manage removeable media such as CDs or flash drives from userspace. Its features include:

    - automount removable media when inserted
    - notifications (on insertion, mount, unmount, …)
    - GTK tray icon to manage all available devices
    - command line tools for manual un-/mounting
    - support for LUKS encrypted devices
    - support for unlocking with keyfiles (requires udisks 2.6.4)
    - support for loop devices (mounting iso archives, requires UDisks2)
    - password caching
    - works with either udisks1 or udisks2
    - an extensible code base (python)
    - a maintainer who is open for suggestions;)

All features can be individually enabled or disabled...

I installed udiskie in Arch, to use in Openbox. udiskie puts an icon in tint2's system tray, automounts flash drives when inserted, and provides notifications when flash drives are inserted, mounted, etc.

I'm using the following line in the ~/.config/openbox/autostart file:

udiskie -s &

(According to the man page, that could also be put in ~/.xinitrc.)

That gives me a "smart" icon in the tint2 system tray whenever a flash drive is plugged in:

       -s, --smart-tray
           Show tray icon that automatically hides when there is no action available.

(See man udiskie.)

Shots of the tray icon's left-click and right-click menus:

Also, the following can be used from the command line for mounting and unmounting /dev/sdbx:

$ udiskie-mount /dev/sdbx
$ udiskie-umount /dev/sdbx