Salix 14.0 + Openbox

Yeah, doing openboxing a third time, now on Slackware - after Xubuntu and Debian. I was kinda interested how this one might differ... Openbox is not stock for Salix (and Slackware), and Slacks' repos are not as big by far as Debian ones.

As it appeared, installing Openbox itself went quite as usual, with slight differences. But some pre-install preparations almost drove me nuts. Whole process took twice as long as in Debian.

1. Pre-installing things:
Let's start with simple.
- Nitrogen for wallpaper, with slapt. No problems. First I had a plan to use Spacefm as desktop manager (and wallpaper-provider) - but Spacefm somehow prevented Conky from starting.
- Conky, with slapt, no problems.
- Volumeicon, with slapt, no problems.
- copied session-exit-script from my Vsido install, once again. And as later was seen, it worked without a hitch.
- Also installed wmctrl (slapt) and xdotool (from source), without problems.
Now, not so simple things.
- Tint2 - available through Sourcery. Only thing I had to install before was Cmake. Then it compiled and worked... unfortunately it wasn't SVN-version (no launchers). Then I went and took source from Tints' home. Made, installed - and found that it's the same one - no launchers.
After some digging around I found this. The writer, by the way, is the same guy who makes Vsido. So thanks, Vastone, for all good things. Tutorial worked like a charm, and I soon had nice patched SVN version of Tint running, with launchers and all.
- Compton (sweat, blood and tears). Not available in repos at all, have to get the source from Comptons' home and compile. List of dependencies is quite long, as we know...
What was surprising that only missing dep in Salix was libconfig. Even asciidoc was already installed! But the joy was short-lived - libconfig also has to be searched out from web. My first attempt to install it was unsuccessful. Thing appeared to exist, but pkg-config refused to recognize it. And Compton refused to make, citing missing libconfig as a culprit. Apparently I had unwittingly brought home a where-libconfig...
More searching in web and I found other and better place to get it. Differently of the first one, it was already compiled for Slack.
So I only had to run  
sh doinst.sh (and replace user/lib64 in this file with /usr/lib64, otherways it couldn't find folders, as install-package was not in root).
Then I checked, somewhat fearfully:
pkg-config libconfig --libs . It's not there, then
echo $PKG_CONFIG_PATH, and path appears to be wrong (compared where libconfig.pc really is, then
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig (that's my conf, of course). Anyway, after correcting the path, libconfig was found AND Compton was now happy to make and make install too.
As for now, I used exactly the same start conf as in debian install. Works alright, no tearing observed yet.
Edit | When installing libconfig, I was yet such a moron that I didn't know of SlackBuilds... Correct way, of course should have been to run: libconfig.SlackBuild, and then installpkg libconfig...gz. But I leave this example of stupidity to be - as there are some useful hints how to check and correct library paths. Also - there are ready-made binaries available in slakfinder.org :) |

2. Installing OB, a lot less dramatic part:
Main packages for Openbox - openbox and obconf - are available with slapt, as is lxappearance. There are also obmenu and some other helpful stuff to take - but I didn't bother.
slapt-get -i openbox obconf
Logout and login to fresh openbox session.
Right-click menu was bizarre, consisting mostly unexistent items. Those what did exist, refused to open.
Back to Xfce, copy Openbox conf files to .config/openbox, add some quick (real) links to menu, back to Openbox. Now things (real ones) in menu opened ... so, I presume that the first time rebellion was because of lack of confs in user folder.
Still, 90% of this default menu was taken out of thin air. Fancy. I should have used dmenu to generate something more valid. Well, I forgot to install it.
One more surprise was that xfce4-terminal is named as 'Terminal'. Bloody why? Couple of more minutes down to drain when investigating why terminal 'does not exist'...
After that it was usual copy/paste of various confs, fixing this and that, 2 hours lovingly pimping the menu, and removing couple of last unwanted apps. Everything seems fine and working. Checked also .xsession-errors - nothing of interest there too, only gtk stupid deprecation-drivel.
Now, if I happen to finally succeed in compiling Medit, then the situation could be called a bliss.