I rarely use compton - typically just for drop shadows, and until the other day had no idea it could dim the inactive windows:



Direct link to image


the lines to adjust in the compton.conf:

inactive-dim = 0.2;
inactive-dim-fixed = true;

makes for a nice, non-blingy effect with no discernible hit to the resources.

hat tip to #! user orionthehunter who displayed this in his recent screenshot.

Good ol' fluxbox -

Anyone else seeing this error with vsido jedi when trying to manager services -

Failed to get D-Bus connection: Unknown error -1



everything works - cups, vsftpd, nfs, lightdm etc .... just can't manage any services; google search wasn't much help so if anyone knows what's up with this an answer will be appreciated.

I did a re-install of dbus and systemd from synaptic but no change (have not rebooted yet though).

only other reference to this I've seen - vsido dus error link

I've had this issue before and forgot how to clear it. I use the Win key a lot in key bindings. The issue now is that if a terminal is open and has focus, it will output some ASCII characters whenever I use the Win key - like starting medit with the Ctrl-W-l binding. Everything still works, I just have to clear the characters before using the terminal again. Minor annoyance.

The screenshot - note that the combinations Win, Ctrl-Win, Alt-Win cause different terminal output.



As I recall, this is a simple fix done with reconfiguring the keyboard, but it alludes me at the moment.

Edit - Solved. Conflicting entry in $HOME/.Xmodmap file

greetings -

was looking into using rsync (grsync) to do some backups and have a question about command line syntax -

Can rsync handle multiple source files on the command line? for example -

rsync file1 file2  /media/usbdrive

if that is doable, what is the proper syntax to list the source files? I didn't see anything in the man page or some online sources (like the Arch Wiki) that specifically call that out. Also, i can't select multiple files, directories with grsync; which leads me to believe it's not possible. But I may just be going about it wrong.

New month, new screenshot thread.

More Fvwm:



Edit - changed the icons; really starting to like the nouveGnomeGray set -

I install the drivers for my nvidia card using the sgfxi script and have noticed one of the options is to install the ia32 libs so that 32-bit apps - like steam or googleearth - will run on a 64-bit system. Has anyone tried using this method?

Use to be that there were just two files needed to be installed on a 64-bit system for 32-bit apps to work, now there is the whole multi-arch method that installs a bunch of dev files. I am curious if the method using sgfxi is the smxi authors' custom build of the ia32 libs so that the old method will still work, their method of installing multi arch, or if it's something that is depricated but still part of the script.

Didn't find mention of it on their website. Any info appreciated.

Anyone seen this error -

When selecting a font in medit, the font list has a bunch of non-existent fonts:



may just be a bug with medit - libreoffice writer doesn't list them.

The only thing different in my setup is that I have a /mnt/public/fonts directory where I download fonts. The directory is linked to all the /home/user/.fonts directories. Gives me a common font directory without having to go into the system directories.

No noticeable degradation of performance and all the existing fonts are usable.

Made our second trip to the lake over the weekend.

My oldest caught her first fish ever -



I, on the other hand, caught me a nice new rod and reel -

Most excellent shots last month; keep them coming and remember to use thumbnails:

Messing around with some blue and green this week -

          

can't bring myself to change my basic setup though. Just too use to it.

I have got to get me one of these!

I run VSIDO on my HP2000 laptop. I only use the touchpad when I absolutely have to and normally go with a usb wireless mouse (inserting shameless plug for logitech here).

In Debian testing/sid and VSIDO I always used the following script to toggle the touchpad off/on:

#!/bin/bash
pgrep syndaemon &>/dev/null; [ $? = 0 ] && killall syndaemon &&

if [ $(synclient -l | grep TouchpadOff | awk '{print $3}') == 1 ] ; then
synclient touchpadoff=0;
else
synclient touchpadoff=1;
fi


Up until the recently, this script has always worked. I can issue the individual synclient commands in a terminal and toggle the touchpad on/off, but the script just fails without an error message. The script is executable.

My guess is that this is the result of the switch to systemd, but I can't see where the script would need to be modified to account for that.

Anyone else suddenly have issues with bash scripts no longer working?

Font error -

Xcalc and xclock were suddenly slow to start so I started them from a terminal. Anyone seen this font error before and have a quick fix:



I tried updating the font cache but that didn't seem to work.

This is actually my slackel box, so an update to a slackware package may have just broke something.

As part of my exploration into light weight window managers with a default Windows user interface, I also took a look at icewm - http://www.icewm.org/. Version 1.3.7 is in the repos; I downloaded 1.3.8 from their site and built from source. There is also a theme package in the repos (I dodn't bother with it) and a package named icewm-lite - don't know why it's "lite". If installing from the repos, you may get a /usr/share/xsessions/icewm.desktop file; I had to make my own.

Once everything is installed and you log in for the first time, you're greeted with a fully functional Win95 looking desktop. The default configuration files ( http://www.icewm.org/manual/icewm-8.html ) are located in /usr/local/share/icewm; if you want to change anything, copy the contents of that directory to $HOME/.icewm and fire up your favorite text editor.

The main configuration file is the preferences file. If you have configured fvwm before, the syntax of this file will look very familiar - I get the feeling that icewm is a fork of fvwm written with "sane" defaults. If you have never configured fvwm before, this file will look a bit intimidating; but it's well commented and the configuration options are pretty self-explanatory. Most of the configuration is a matter of uncomenting the desired option and answering yes or no (0 or 1). The default key bindings and theme are also in this file.

The other configuration files to be concerned with are keys (key bindings), menu (the default menu), and toolbar (launcher buttons for the taskbar). All are pretty straight forward to edit, and the IceWm Manual page on the home page is well documented - however, the FAQ page on that site looks to be a little depricated. For some reaason, icewm did not install a man page (or installed to some odd location) - hopefully, if you install from the repos there is a man page as well.

In addition to the main icewm (and icewm-session) programs, there is icewmtray - a system tray; and icewmbg for setting the background on the desktop and provide some transparency support. Both those apps need to be started before icewm in order to work - my starticewm file:

#!/bin/sh

xset s off &
xset b 33 &
xsetroot -solid "#140C0B"
xmodmap "$HOME/.Xmodmap"
xrdb -l "$HOME/.Xresources"
urxvtd -q -o -f &
(sleep 2s && icewmbg) &
(sleep 2s && icewmtray) &
(sleep 2s && nitrogen --restore) &
(sleep 2s && wicd-gtk --tray) &
(sleep 2s && "$HOME/bin/ConkyIcewm.sh") &

# And last but not least we start the window manager.
# Because it is the last app you have to run it with ''exec'' before it.

exec icewm-session

Not sure what the difference is if you go with icewm or icewm-session - both worked fine so I didn't search for an explanation.

Edit - found it in the icewm FAQ - if icewm-session is used, then icewm will use a startup file when you log in. Create the file "startup" in $HOME/.icewm and edit it like you would the openbox autostart file. Remember to make it executable.

There are a bunch of themes for icewm on box-look.org - simply download one to $HOME/.icewm/themes and extract the contents. The icewm menu auto updates so the new theme will appear in the theme entry. The default theme defined in the preferenes file is color based; the included themes and thmes on box-look.org are pixmap based. If you have good skills with gimp, you can make a pretty decent theme; otherwise you're kind of stuck with a retro Win95/98 or Fvwm look. The home page for icewm has a detailed page explaining how to create a theme, and each theme has a default.theme file that can be edited to tweak any contributed theme you decide to go with.

The boxy fvwm look is fine with me, but one thing I didn't like is that the size, padding, and relief of the taskbar is hard coded - a lot of the pixmap themes appear to be using gradients to hide this little annoyance. The height of the taskbar is, in part, determined by the width of the pixmaps used and setting the IconSize options in the preference file.

IceWm is pretty light on resources - comparable to jwm, fluxbox, fvwm, and has it's own taskbar, toolbar (launchers), systemtray, clock, and a few taskbar plugins to monitor memory usage, cpu usage, battery, and network.  If you don't want to go that route, icewm plays pretty well with tint2 and conky; however, the internal logout command for icewm treats tint2 and conky as open windows and prompts you to save their contents before exiting. You can work around this by making a key binding and menu entry for the vsido-exit command.

You can also edit the preferences file and change -

#  Command to start logout
# LogoutCommand=""

to

#  Command to start logout
LogoutCommand="vsido-exit"

but that work around still shows a prompt asking if you want to exit before running vsido-exit.

So, even though icewm is light on resources,  fully functional on it's own, and fairly straight forward to set up, after going through all the steps to get it configured the way I wanted, my personal preference is just go with jwm, or fvwm to get a Windows-like user interface.

Icewm ,      fluxbox and fvwm for comparison -

           

Revisited jwm window manager the past few days. Wanted something with a bit more Windows-like user interface to set up my kids user account; and since there always seems to be an interest in wm's that are light on resources, I decided to post the results.

Version 2.1 is in the Sid repos; or you can get Version 2.2.2 from git - http://www.joewing.net/index.shtml

Besides being light on resources (up to 50% less than openbox on some systems, although I get nothing close to that), one thing I like about jwm is that it is self contained. Jwm has it's own panel (called the tray) that can contain a menu, pager, app launch buttons, taskbar, systemtray (called the dock <- poor choice of names there, imo), and the clock. The tray can be horizontal or vertical, and multiple trays can be configured by adding additional Tray entries to the $HOME/.jwmrc; or you can use jwm without a tray by completely removing the Tray section.

In addition to the systemtray, jwm also has the ability to swallow apps into the tray - the example in the Arch wiki is to swallow wicd-gtk --tray - but I haven't gotten it to work. Maybe because I pulled the current version from git.

The other nice thing about jwm is that it is still being developed by the original author, although there can be a lot of time between releases.

All configuration is done through the $HOME/.jwmrc file. This is file is in xml format like the openbox rc.xml file. In addition to the tray configuration, there are sections for autostarted apps, key bindings, and styles - http://www.joewing.net/projects/jwm/config.shtml ; Very easy to navigate and get the wm up and running to suit your needs. However, there are no gui apps to configure the .jwmrc file.

Jwm plays well with conky, not so much with compositing (on my system anyway). For the screenshot, I added a second panel with just a clock:



So, if you're in the market for a wm that uses a bit less resources than *box, but still want that panel, systemtray, etc ... take a look at jwm.

Was setting up tint2 as a pager of sorts -



one issue I'm having is getting larger icons. I tried setting different panel widths and paddings, but the icons weren't expanding in the vertical. Am I missing something obvious? I was trying to get 48x48 icons.

Edit - never mind, figured it out.

Pertinent section -

Quotetask_maximum_size = width height
        width is used with horizontal panel. width = 0 to get full taskbar width
        height is used with vertical panel

was misinterpreting how that worked.

I'll start -

A couple new fluxbox styles I'm messing with -





Happy and prosperous 2014 to all.

and remember (shamelessly taken from #! forum):

Please use thumbnails (please try to avoid the large thumbnail imgur.com code) linking to the larger image to help those of us with slow connections. Most image hosting sites will automatically generate this for you as well.

At least none of it needed batteries -



I don't want to see another Lego for 6 months - 

At request of vastone, working on an openbox theme for VSIDO 2 -

Results to date:

 

Some minor changes to VSIDO aesthetics -

1. Added a clock to the top lxpanel, and this panel is no longer treated as a dock with reserved space to maximize vertical screen real estate.
2. Cleaned up the conky_ob_rc file - removed some double entries and balanced out the linear spacing with ${offset xx}; no changes to colour or system variables.
3. Using a comptonobx.conf - adds some shadows, fade effects, conky window and lxpanel are now excluded from compton effects.

Many additions to rc.xml file to provide window movement and resizing; key binding control to launch VSIDO apps.

thoughts -

Been checking out bspwm - second time I've tried it, put a little more patience and effort into this time.

It's a tiling window manager written by an arch linux user - check out the dedicated thread

There are two programs to install - bspwm itself, and the program to define the key bindings - sxhkd - both available from the github linked in the op of the arch thread.

Here is a good HowTo for installing on a debian system (it's in the aur for you arch users).

First time I tried using bspwm, I tried it with xbindkeys because sxhkd wasn't working for me (and a couple #! users) but following that HowTo fixed whatever was messing me up - dependency? Using xbindkeys was causing some issues with other window managers on my system, so go with sxhkd. Two other recommended programs - dzen2 and dmenu.

There is a bit of a learning curve - particularly with the default key bindings - to understand how the windows get manipulated, so read the man pages for bspwm and sxhkd before logging in for the first time. After learning some basics, and setting up some key bindings you're comfortable with, manipulating windows becomes pretty straight forward.

Like most tilers, it has it's default layout - the binary space partitioning was why I checked it out in the first place, it's unique. But, window partitioning can be manual as well - reminiscent of musca window manager for any that have tried it - so it's really easy to get open windows into the layout you want.

Some screenshots -



Panels do work with this window manager, but I'm not sure I got them set up correctly - got the panel started, but it is "always on top" so a portion of the active window disappears beneath the panel. Don't know if that's the default and can be changed. One way around it is to set the:

bspc config window_gap

in the $HOME/.config/bspwm/bspwmrc file to a value that leaves the panel uncovered, but there is only one setting for left, right, top, bottom, and space between open windows so a setting of 20 to clear a panel will leave a lot of unused screen space.



The default panels are defined by some pretty impressive bash scripts and require dzen2 be installed.

The conky in the screenshots is a regular conky with:

own_window no

Rules can be set up so that windows float by default (xine in the screenshot) and open on a particular desktop (9 virtual desktops by default).

All in all, a good, usable window manager that doesn't take too much effort to learn the basics. Hopefully, the project continues. This single post can't really do it justice, read through the arch thread to get an idea of what can be done with this wm; or watch the screencast (link at top of page) -- http://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/1m0ea1/arch_bspwm_why_bspwm_watch_this_screencast_and/