Fluxbox: Installation and commissioning

flux box is next to open box, one of the best known and used window managers today. In this post I will explain how to install and set up this great light environment.

Installation:

Many distributions have packages of flux box in their repositories, so we can use the corresponding package manager to install it:

Archlinux / Cruchbang:
pacman -S fluxbox

Debian / Mint / Ubuntu / etc
apt-get install fluxbox

Once installed and after logging in, we will find the default configuration, which may vary from one distros to another, which is in the hidden folder .fluxbox in our user directory.

In this tutorial we will focus on the folder styles and in the files keys, menu and startup:

• styles: In this folder will go the themes that we download from the internet or that we make
• startup: In it we will indicate to Fluxbox which programs, processes, etc. it should execute when logging in
• menu: the Fluxbox menu is saved in this file.

Setting up the login

As I already mentioned in the file startup we will put what we need to be executed when we log in, for example the program in charge of checking updates, a panel, dockbar, the network connection manager, etc.

To add it, we just have to write each command in a line and that it ends with the symbol &. For example:

nm-applet &
thunar --daemon &
lxpanel --profile LXDE &

Modifying the menu

[exec] (Title) {command}: With this we instruct Fluxbox to add an entry in the menu to execute an order. For example:
[exec] (Firefox) {firefox}
And if we want to add an icon, just add between the symbols <> the full path to the icon:
[exec] (Firefox) {firefox}
To add a submenu we write the following:
[submenu] (Texto)
......
[end]
We can nest several submenus within one.

And finally we would add the menu for Fluxbox from which to configure the environment:

[submenu] (FluxBox) [workspaces] (Workspaces) [submenu] (Styles) [stylesdir] (/ usr / share / fluxbox / styles) [stylesdir] (~ / .fluxbox / styles) [end] [config] (Configure ) [reconfig] (Reconfig) [restart] (Restart) [separator] [exit] (Exit) [end] [end]

Once modified we have to reload the configuration, so we open the Fluxbox menu and go to Fluxbox »Reconfig if we have the default configuration.

Use Fluxbox instead of Openbox in LXDE

One of the advantages of LXDE is that we can replace Openbox with other window managers, in this case we are going to replace it with flux box.

For this we create the file ~ / .config / lxsession / LXDE / desktop.conf with the following content:
[Session] window_manager=fluxbox
There are many more options to configure Fluxbox, but that escapes a bit from what is intended with this article. to finish I leave you a current capture of my desktop and several links of interest.

Links of interest

Fluxbox official page
Official Wiki (contains some articles in Spanish)
Box Look: Contains themes for Fluxbox and other lightweight environments
My themes for Fluxbox
Modify the position of the buttons of the windows and elements of the Fluxbox toolbar
Groups in Deviantart that every Linux user should follow