How to make a nice Openbox session in Ubuntu
First of all, I have to tell you that Openbox is not for the beginners. It takes some work to customize it until it fits your needs. I can't tell you exactly what to do to make it good for you. However, I can tel you what I've done myself for your inspiration. The first thing to do is installing openbox, tint2, nitrogen, synapse, gmrun, gtk-chtheme, conky, yakuake, and what else you need to make it work properly. You do this by typing in the following command: sudo apt-get install openbox tint2 nitrogen gmrun gtk-chtheme conky yakuake If you log into an Openbox session at this point, the only thing you will see is a gray background. If you right-click on the background, a menu will appear. There is not much you can do in this menu, and the only way to start applications is through the terminal, for which there is a link in the menu. In some cases, there is a sub-menu named "Debian", but it has somehow never appeared at my computer. From this submenu, you will be able to open most of the applications installed on your computer. First thing to do is to get ourselves a background. This is done in the newly installed application Nitrogen. Go to a terminal and type "nitrogen" (without quotation marks). This will open an application giving you the ability to easily apply a wallpaper. Go find a wallpaper and apply it. Next, we're going to run Synapse, which is done by typing "synapse" (again, no quotation marks) in a terminal. This gives you the ability to quickly open applications, documents, and web sites through a pop-up window spawned by pressing [Ctrl]+[Space]. This key combination and other settings can be modified through the "settings" item in the menu of the window. Now we need a panel. For this, we have installed tint2. Run it from a Synapse window or a terminal and it should appear as a small panel at the bottom of the screen. The panel is customizable, but we will save that for later. If you're like me and you want to keep an eye on the performance of your computer, conky is a nice and highly configurable application. This will give you a widget-like item on your desktop. If you want an easily accessible terminal, Yakuake will do the job. Run Yakuake through Synapse and spawn it by pressing F12. That's about it. So now we have a wallpaper, an application launcher, and a panel. But, if you log out and log back in, it's all gone again. And we don't want to have to open all the applications through a terminal every time we log in. So the next thing we're going to do is modifying the autostart file. In a Synapse window, type "gksudo gedit". Once you've entered your password and gedit has appeared, we need to open the autostart file, which is located in the /etc/xdg/openbox directory. First of all, we need to choose a config tools set. I've chosen Gnome. Remove the # symbols from line 9 to 13. Now we're going to add our own autostart applications. Insert the following lines to the bottom of the document: numlockx on & tint2 & conky & synapse & update-notifier & nitrogen --restore & yakuake & xcompmgr -cC -t-3 -l-5 -r5 -n & Now save the document. If you'd like to check if the autostart file works as it should then go ahead and try it out. Everything should work. So now it's time to customize a bit. tint2 is relatively customizable. There are very few items to apply to the panel (task list, notification area, clock, and battery), but the panel itself is very customizable. There are two ways to edit the theme. There is a GUI tool for it, and there is editing the config file manually. The config file, tint2rc, is located in the /home/username/.config directory. You can find forums and other places on the net where people share their config files. The easiest way to change theme is to replace your own config file with some of these and see what suits you best. You can always use the GUI tool to adjust the themes, or, of course, do it manually. Skins for conky are available several places on the Internet, such as DeviantArt. Most skins come with a guide on how to install it, especially the more advanced ones, but the more simple skins are installed by simply placing the .conkyrc file of the theme in your home folder. You can always adjust the skins by editing the .conkyrc file if something needs to be changed. So, this is just about it. I hope you can use my guide. Do share!
