This guide will show you how to customize your Openbox so you can use it like a pro.

Install Openbox

Assuming you are using a Ubuntu/debian based distro, you can install openbox with the command:

sudo apt-get install openbox obconf

Once you have installed openbox, logout of your current session and choose Openbox on the login screen.

Configure Menu

Don’t be panic if you see a blank screen upon login. All your applications are still intact, just that they are not displayed in the desktop. The first step is to add the Applications menu to the desktop so you can easily access your apps. Right click your mouse and you should see a popup menu. Select “Terminal Emulator“.

Type in the following command:

sudo apt-get install menu
cp /var/lib/openbox/debian-menu.xml ~/.config/openbox/debian-menu.xml
cp /etc/xdg/openbox/menu.xml ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml
cp /etc/xdg/openbox/rc.xml ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml
openbox --reconfigure

Note: In Ubuntu, the configuration files are installed to the /etc/X11 folder instead of /etc/xdg, so you should use the following commands instead:

cp /etc/X11/openbox/menu.xml ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml
cp /etc/X11/openbox/rc.xml ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml

What we have done above is

1. Install the debian menu. This will automatically arranged your existing, as well as newly installed applications into an ordered list.
2. copy the configuration files from the system to your own personal folder so your settings won’t get overridden in the next update.

By now, when you right click your mouse to access the popup menu, you should see the Debian item in the list. From there, you should be able to access your applications.

Next, we are going to add our frequently accessed application to the popup menu for quick access. To do that, we need to install obmenu (Openbox Menu Editor).

sudo apt-get install obmenu

Run obmenu:

obmenu

To add a new item, click the “New Item” button. At the bottom input field, enter a name for your item and the command to execute. For example, to create a Google Chrome shortcut, enter “Google Chrome” in the label field and “google-chrome” (without the quotes) in the command field.

You can repeat the same step for any of your favorite app.

Once you have completed your changes, click the “Save” icon to save the changes. Now, right click your mouse anywhere on the desktop, you should see your applications appear in the popup.

Autostart items/scripts/applications on login

When Openbox loads, it will run the autostart script in the “~/.config/openbox” folder. To add items/applications/scripts to the autostart list, you just have to open a text editor, add the command to run for each items (one item per line). Save the file as “autostart” (without the quotes and any file extension) in the ~/.config/openbox folder.

Adding a panel/taskbar

If you prefer to have a panel/taskbar on your desktop, there are several panels that you can use. Tint2 and xfce4-panel are two lightweight panels that you can use. There is also another popular choice: pypanel, but it has not been developed since 2005 and it is no longer in the Ubuntu repository.

You can install tint2 with the command:

sudo apt-get install tint2

or xfce4-panel with

sudo apt-get install xfce4-panel

Next, add them to your autostart script so it will launch everytime you login.

Alternatively, you can also install AWN or Cairo-dock to give you a dock launcher.

Change theme

If you don’t like the default theme of Openbox, you can always change it. Right click your mouse and go to “obconf”. The first option is the “Theme” option where you can change the system theme. If all the themes in the library is not of your liking, you can go to Box-look.org to search and download your favorite theme (make sure it is in .obt format). To install new theme, simply select “install a new theme”button in obconf -> Themes..

Change Background wallpaper

sudo apt-get install feh

Still in the terminal, open the image with feh

feh /path-of-images

When it loads up, right click on the image and select “File -> Background -> Set as Centered”.

Alternatively, you can use Nitrogen to change your desktop background. It comes with a GUI, so it is much easier to use.

Change the keyboard shortcut/Bind a new shortcut key

In Openbox, the keyboard shortcuts are configured in the ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml file. Open the rc.xml file with a text editor. Scroll down the file until you see the keyboard section. Below it, you should see something like this:

 <keybind key="C-A-Left">
      <action name="GoToDesktop">
        <to>left</to>
        <wrap>no</wrap>
      </action>
    </keybind>

The ‘C’, ‘A’,’ S’ and ‘W’ characters stand for “Ctrl”, “Alt”, “Shift” and “Win” button respectively. For the example shown above, the “Ctrl + Alt + Left” shortcut key will move to the left workspace. You can create your own shortcut keys by adding into the list. For more actions that you can use, refer to the Actions list in the Openbox wiki.

Conclusion

Openbox is a highly customizable desktop manager and the above mentioned method only provide a glimpse of what you can do with it. For new users, that should be enough to get you started. For more info, do check out the Openbox wiki for guide and information.

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Change of theme

Open your file manager, in your Home folder, create a .themes folder. The folder will become hidden after it is created. You will have to press “Ctrl + H” to display hidden files.

Go to gnome-look.org to search for gtk2.0 themes or box-look.org to search for Openbox themes.

For this example, I will use the Ambiance theme that is used in Ubuntu. Go to Gnome-look.org and download the Ambience GTK theme. Extract the tar file. You should see two zip files: theme and icon.

Extract the content of the theme zip files to the .themes folder that you just created. Go to “Preferences -> Customize Look And Feel” (older version of Lubuntu is “Preferences -> Appearance“).

On the window that show up, you should see the newly installed theme on the left pane. Click on the new theme follow by the “Apply” button.

Your window background and style will change instantly to the new theme (note: the window border and panel will remain unchanged).

Change of icon set

Still on the same window, click on the Icon Theme tab. Click the Install button.

Choose the tar.gz or tar.bz icon theme file that you have downloaded.

Note: In this example, the Ambiance Icon theme is in zip file, which is not recognized by the system. An easier way is to extract the content of the zip file to “/usr/share/icons”

sudo unzip maverick-meerkat-icon.zip -d /usr/share/icons

Your new icon theme should now appear in the Look and Feel window. Choose your favorite icon theme and click Apply.

Change the Panel background

Right click on an empty in the bottom panel and select “Panel Settings”.

Click on the Appearance tab and select “System theme”. Click Close. (Note: In some instances, you might have to select the Solid color (with opacity) option before selecting the System theme option)

Change of window border

If you have noticed, changing the theme does not change the window border. We need to apply a .obt (OpenBox Theme) file to change the window border.

Go to box-look.org and download the Ambiance obt file.

Double click the downloaded .obt file. It will install itself to the system and open the Openbox configuration Manager. That’s it.

Change of desktop wallpaper

On the desktop, right click and select Desktop Preference. You can change your wallpaper from here.

Alternatively, install feh

sudo apt-get install feh

to set any image as wallpaper from the file manager.

This is the final result:

Wrapping up

While the above procedure is for the Ambiance theme, it should work for all other themes as well. Enjoy.

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• Taking LXDE For a Test Drive
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I began by installing LXDE from my apt mirror. If you’re not sure how to do this, open a command terminal and enter

apt-get install lxde

As always, your distro of choice may have a different installation method.

Once everything’s installed, log out of your current desktop environment and log back in under LXDE. Each distribution’s package may have different settings, but for me I got the following as my default desktop:

As you can see from the screenshot, LXDE uses a roughly Windows-like setup, with a panel at the bottom, “Start” button, desktop icons, etc. That should make it a fairly easy transition desktop for those just switching from Windows.

It may not be fair to stack LXDE against Openbox in particular, as LXDE is essentially Openbox with some additional utilities. Essentially, what the creators have done is take Openbox as a window manager and add some custom-built applications to turn it into a full-featured, consistent desktop environment. The tools you’re likely to encounter in an LXDE installation are:

• PCMan – File Manager
• LXLauncher – Application Launcher
• LXPanel – Desktop Panel
• LXSession – Session Manager
• LXAppearance – Theme Manager
• LXTerminal – Terminal Emulator
• LXTask – Task Manager
• LXNM – Network Manager

Of these, I’ll be focusing on PCManfm, LXPanel, and LXNM, as they have the most effect on the overall desktop experience.

PCMan File Manager

I thought it fitting to start with the PCMan File Manager as it was the first component of what eventually became LXDE. I’ve tried most of the file manager GUIs out there and found PCManfm to an easy, comfortable program that so far has met all my needs. Some of the key bindings didn’t match what I’m used to from other file managers, but that’s mostly a matter of preference. There’s nothing really fancy here, just a nice fast little file manager that gets the job done.

LXPanel

The panel at the bottom of the screen in LXDE is another example of an app that just seems to focus on getting the job done without any revolutionary new concepts. It’s got the “Start” button, quick launch bar, desktop pager, all the usual items you see in your average panel. It supports various panel applets including those meant for Gnome.

LXNM

The network manager, LXNM, wasn’t as simple as the rest of the system for me. I was a bit surprised to see that LXNM was not part of my LXDE installation. The network manager panel applet in the screenshots above is the same applet found in recent Ubuntu releases, the nm-applet program for Gnome.

When I tried to install LXNM from my apt repositories, it said nm-applet had to be removed. No problem, I let it remove the Gnome applet and install itself. On launch, however, the LXNM applet failed to load and threw a screen full of errors at me.

Eventually I removed LXNM and reinstalled the Gnome applet and all was well. I’ve got no problems with running the Gnome applet as I’ve always found it to be a simple and powerful network manager, especially when compared to the tangled mess Vista calls the “Network and Sharing Center”.

I did some searching on LXNM and found that it has had a more troubled history than most parts of LXDE, and is currently being redesigned. My advice: stick with the NetworkManager applet until LXNM has had a little more polish applied.

Configuration

This is one point where I felt LXDE was a little bit lacking. As I said above, LXDE uses Openbox as the default window manager, so you do have obconf for some of the system configuration.

This will give you some of the config options you may need like setting dock preferences and themes and such. The downside is that any other configuration must be done in one huge XML file. Normally I don’t mind editing config files by hand but this one is enormous, and XML isn’t always the easiest thing to read and edit by hand. If you do find yourself needing to change configuration for something that isn’t in the Openbox config utility, load up your favorite text editor and open ~/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml. I Highly recommend using a text editor with XML highlighting such as Kate.

Conclusion

I found LXDE to a pretty nice desktop environment. It’s certainly fast, comes with a reasonable amount of good quality tools, and a nice appearance. There’s room for improvement, however, particularly when it comes to configuration. I would count it as a good option for recent Windows converts, particularly those with older hardware that might have trouble running a beefier desktop such as Gnome or KDE. Has it pulled me away from my beloved Window Maker? I don’t think so, but it’s progressing nicely and I’d love to see what the developers come up with down the road.

I’d love to hear your experiences with LXDE, or other lightweight desktop environments.

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Nitrogen is a simple, lightweight application that allows you to change the background of your desktop. Some of its key features include support for Multihead and Xinerama, a recall mode that can remember the last wallpaper set and command line mode for script use.

If you are using Ubuntu 8.10 (with Openbox) or any other debian-based system, here is how you install and configure Nitrogen.

In your terminal,

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

add this two lines to the end of the file.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/k-belding/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/k-belding/ubuntu intrepid main

Press Ctrl + O to save the file and Ctrl + X to close the file.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nitrogen

This should install Nitrogen on your system

Setting background wallpaper

Assume that your wallpaper folder is at /home/username/wallpaper.

In the terminal, type

nitrogen ~/wallpaper

A window will pop up showing all the wallpaper in the folder. Pick the one that you want to set as background image and click Apply.

That’s it

To get it to autostart everytime you log in, in your terminal,

nano ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh

Paste this into the end of the file

nitrogen --restore &

If the autostart.sh file does not exist, you will have to manually create one before you can carry out the above step.

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