Openbox on Pclos part 3

Well, I think I've tweaked my openbox setup to a nice and usable desktop environment on pclinuxos. The software works well and it responds much better than the initial kde install, which just felt.... slow....

The gtk themes work nicely, as do the icons, once you figure out how to make openbox access them. To access your icons you create a file called .gtkrc.mine in your home directory and add your icons in this format

gtk-icon-theme-name = "nuoveXT-aero"

Where nuoveXT-aero is my choice for the icon theme. You can see what icon themes you have installed in /usr/share/icons. Simply substitute for your preferred icon theme. Then you log out of openbox and back in and your icons will have been changed!

Obconf handles themes, and you can install new themes into /usr/share/themes for Obconf to easily find.

When I opened up openoffice, I found that it had NO clue what theme to use and saw a REALLY ugly interface. So I added the following to my ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh file

export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome &

This told openbox to force the nice gnome gtk theme on openbox so it doesn't look hideous.

I installed xscreensaver, which has several nice sets of screensavers actually in the repos, and told openbox to start it on login by adding to my autostart.sh file

xscreensaver -no-splash &

Pcmanfm is a great file manager and it can handle both your desktop background and desktop icons. I don't like desktop icons personally, but if you do, then do the following

pcmanfm -> edit -> preferences -> Desktop

Then click manage the desktop and show file icons. You can then choose your wallpaper and how to display it. Easy eh?

Although I love pcmanfm as a filemanager I don't want icons on my desktop... and I also want to maintain my ability to right click on the desktop and bring up my openbox menu, as sometimes it's just faster than moving the mouse all the way to the bottom of the screen on the left to access the fbpanel start menu. So I'll use the great little program called feh. It can be found in the repositories.

Simply execute the command

feh --bg-scale /path/to/image.file

Where /path/to/image.file is the full path to your desired desktop background wallpaper image.

Then you add the following to your autostart.sh file

eval `cat $HOME/.fehbg` &

This will cause openbox to load this wallpaper upon login.

Here's what I added to my ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh file

pcmanfm &
conky &
fbpanel &
volwheel &
eval `cat $HOME/.fehbg` &
xscreensaver -no-splash &
export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome &

Have fun with openbox!