jwm

i seem to have come full circle, through quite a lot of de/wm back to the rather humble jwm. and i'm quite pleasantly surprised. jwm replaces my current openbox + tint2 setup quite well, perhaps even better.. more efficient, quicker, smaller, faster, simpler and very customisable. jwm gives me everything i use in openbox and tint2 combined. i think this is the end of my openbox saga.

fortune bible

probably not to everyone's tastes, but may generate some ideas for others ;)

i grew weary of the random quotes, and wanted something more inspirational O:)

#! openbox background/wallpaper

i keep only openbox relevant stuff in the openbox/autostart, and moved everything .xsession. this way, i can seemlessly change wm.

my ~/.xsession contains:
hsetroot -solid "#000000" -fill ~/.wallpaper &
...
exec openbox-session

i have commented out wallpaper settings in ~/.config/openbox/autostart, like so:
## Set root window colour
#hsetroot -solid "#2E3436" &

## Group start:
## 1. nitrogen - restores wallpaper
## 2. compositor - start
## 3. sleep - give compositor time to start
## 4. tint2 panel
#nitrogen --restore && \
(\
cb-compositor --start && \
sleep 2s && \
tint2 \
) &

my problem:
hsetroot in ~/.xsession correctly sets my wallpaper. at some point during openbox startup, the wallpaper settings are reset, and i end up with a blank grey background at the end of openbox startup.

my question:
what/where is this happening?

---

thanks for the hint to look at openbox configs. i suspected something running from somewhere in my user configs. it is rather strange that openbox would contain hard-coded configs overwriting user settings. i would consider this a bug. would this be openbox upstream or crunchbang specific?

/usr/bin/openbox-session calls
1. /etc/xdg/openbox/environment
2. $HOME/.config/openbox/environment
3. /usr/lib/openbox/openbox-autostart

/usr/lib/openbox/openbox-autostart sets background, resetting any user settings for background/wallpaper. then it calls
1. /etc/xdg/openbox/autostart
2. $HOME/.config/openbox/autostart
3. /usr/lib/openbox/openbox-xdg-autostart

which means that any ~/.xsession settings, conflicting in any of the above files, would be overwritten. openbox expects all user x configs to be within openbox only, which i think is plain wrong.

i have commented out the background color section in /usr/lib/openbox/openbox-autostart, which resolves my op. thanks porkpiehat :)

/etc/X11/openbox/ is yet another directory with openbox configs

i am loathe to edit system configs, as they might conflict with upstream upgrades later when i might not remember what/why i changed something. hence why i keep them pristine, preferring to keep my settings in local user configs. this also help me seemlessly switch wm and/or carry them over to other machines.

would openbox expect users to call ~/.xsession at the end of ~/.config/openbox/autostart? that would be crazy logic :o

---

ref: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=31614

NetworkManager

i don't prefer/recommend gnome, as it tries to be everything and do everything. bloatwares usually become #TBTF :( and NetworkManager (pulling in gnome libs) seems to be in that bandwagon..

for now, i'm keeping NetworkManager in #!. wireless auto-connect seems intermittent (more often than not). nm does remember all the settings though. and i can manually connect, when tired of waiting.

nm also has some cmdline tools. i used nmcli in openbox/autostart to force connect wireless. if you use another window manager or log in to console, you could use it in your relevant startup/login scripts.

sleep 1m && \
while [ "$(nmcli -t -f WIFI,STATE nm)" = 'enabled:disconnected' ]
do
nmcli con up id {wireless-ssid}
sleep 5
done &

ref: http://blog.nixpanic.net/2011/01/connect-automatically-and-immediately.html

[Addendum] this laptop has an atheros wireless card, with working drivers in kernel. i also found a driver listed in the debian repository. after installing firmware-atheros, auto-connect issues have become very rare. i have no idea why!

#! crunchbang pruning

crunchbang is nicely setup, but as per my previous post it still has bloatwares lurking about.

i'll expand this post further, but meanwhile here's something to-do:

remove gdm
trayer to replace {...}
rxvt + tmux to replace terminator

when i need to be more productive and not get distracted:

add ratpoison
add opera

#! crunchbang openbox menus

#! default menu opens with a right click on desktop. This menu is static and needs to be maintained by the user. Middle click opens an auto-populated window/desktop menu. Left click has no associated menu.

Debian menu, although installed, is not configured/enabled. This is what I target: Left click -> Debian menu.

I kept the right click and middle click menus undisturbed, but added the debian-menu to the left click.

#! crunchbang 10 statler r20110207

For a while now, I have been hearing and thinking about crunchbang linux, or #! as the community calls it. So finally, I decided to dive in and install crunchbang-10-20110207-openbox-i686 on my spare laptop.

I have been recommending Linux Mint Debian XFCE lately to newbies. I am rethinking that now. It seems LMDX still has a lot of dependencies on Gnome and other bloatwares hanging on from its legacy days. For example, the XFCE Edition uses Gnome-Terminal rather than XFCE-Terminal. IMHO, that defeats the purpose of not wanting to use Gnome.

#! seems to be smoother and slicker at first glance. I like what I see, although the initial install used almost 2G of diskspace. There is a lot of gnome/etc bloatware which shouldn't have made it to this supposedly minimalist openbox distribution. Mint seems not much worse compared to this. (But compare this to my debian-wheezy laptop setup, with everything I need, on about 650M diskspace!!)

dd if=crunchbang-10-20110207-openbox-i686.iso of=/dev/{usb-drive}
was sufficient and simple to make a usb key for testing or install.

For some strange reason, I had trouble booting #! cd/usb. Apparently, it could be due to my screen - max resolution 1024x768. I almost gave up before I understood the issue. Wonder who the #! developers are targetting?

So I edit the grub boot menu, and append vga=773, and only then was I able to boot #! cd/usb to test or install. The install was fairly smooth with no major concerns, except that the drive partitioner seemed to be creating partitions not ending on cylinder boundaries. I reinstalled, after manually partitioning my drive with fdisk.

So, now I have a pristine install of #! waiting to be devoured.

Initial tasks were to update the system:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

#! /etc/apt/sources.list points to German servers, instead of UK ones, which lagged, due to about twice the network distance/time. It was fairly simple to replace de with uk. Since, #! tracks debian-stable (squeeze), and the installer contents are about 8mths old, about ~250M of initial upgrades were waiting. Squeeze is stable and updates shouldn't be frequent, except the security ones.

Then, I installed some of my missing favourites:
- rdate
- localepurge
- ncdu
- tmux
- most

Keep an eye here for my #! adventures... :-)

Re: Dear LazyWeb, please help persuade my dad to move to Linux

"I get the feeling that my dad would be more inclined to accept advice from a PC World salesman than he would from me."

If that is the case, my advice would be to take your dad to PC World! Show him some of the Linux netbooks, and get the salesman to convince your dad why he might like them. :-)

Re: Dear LazyWeb, please help persuade my dad to move to Linux

I just stopped giving free support to them if they run Windows. I don't run Windows. I don't care about Windows. If they want to keep running Windows, they can do so and there are a number of places they can buy support or they can bug someone else to fix their problems for them. If, on the other hand, they want to run Linux, I'll gladly do the support.