HOWTO: A Blackbox Guide

[bluevoodoo1]

It's trickier if you compile it since you'll have to manually make an entry for it in the gdm. Do you have the 'build-essential' package? What exactly were the errors of make install? Can you post the terminal output of it? I suggest you get "checkinstall." Then use 'sudo checkinstall' instead of 'make install'. checkinstall will make a .deb file so later if you want to remove it you can use Synaptic to remove it or 'sudo dpkg -r BLAHBLAH'.

[nitefly]

found the build-essentials, installed it plus a bunch of other stuff, i managed to compile bb. yaay! now comes the big part, configuring it..
thanks for tip!

[william_nbg]

I had the same problem with 'no .rc' file.

Found a good work around on the backbox home page, in their wiki

http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/Bl...leHowDoIGetOne

[bluevoodoo1]

found the build-essentials, installed it plus a bunch of other stuff, i managed to compile bb. yaay! now comes the big part, configuring it..
thanks for tip!

Great! Now the fun part!

I had the same problem with 'no .rc' file.

Found a good work around on the backbox home page, in their wiki

http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/Bl...HowDoIGe tOne

Thanks! I added that to the guide...

Also added... A link to the compilation requirements required for Blackbox (from their wiki)

[uzi09]

wow, thats one hella nice desktop ^_^

thanks very much for the helpful article,
uzi

[R3linquish3r]

for some reason (i tried both downlaoding from repo's and compiling myself) it wont create a .blackbox folder and i have to make it myself and im not skilled enough to setup the menu file and such that i need. why isnt the folder being made on its own?

[bluevoodoo1]

for some reason (i tried both downlaoding from repo's and compiling myself) it wont create a .blackbox folder and i have to make it myself and im not skilled enough to setup the menu file and such that i need. why isnt the folder being made on its own?

Strange, I don't have an answer for that. Well make a .blackbox folder in your home folder. Inside that you might want to make a backgrounds and styles folder as well. In your .blackbox folder make a new file called menu. Grab my sample menu and paste it in if you like, you can change it to anything you like. Then look in your home folder for the .blackboxrc file and make sure...

session.menuFile: /home/user-name-goes-here/.blackbox/menu

reads accordingly. If you do not have a .blackboxrc file either read this link.

You might have to hit "restart" or "reconfigure" from the blackbox menu (it will restart/refresh blackbox).

If you get the bbconf program it will graphically help you make a menu (you will have to know the commands of the programs you want to open). I hope that helps. Post again if things don't work.

[uzi09]

for some reason (i tried both downlaoding from repo's and compiling myself) it wont create a .blackbox folder and i have to make it myself and im not skilled enough to setup the menu file and such that i need. why isnt the folder being made on its own?

when i loaded up BB on my school computer, i ran into the same situtation - no .blackbox directory. i just did it all manually - not very hard AT ALL! basically, create the directory (duh! =D). the only thing i really had a problem with was the fact that they said (on all these websites) that to modify something, we just need to modify such and such file and "alakazam it works!", but because i didn't know what format the files should be in (much less what things i can use/modify in it) it was a bit of a problem (hopefully BB dev's will do this automatically in future versions).

i just did a quick google search for things like "keys sample file" as well as read up on BB's user documentation (http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/Bl...Documentation). the documentation stated that the directory and files may not be there in which case we can just copy the sample files from where the source is located, but the problem with that was BB was preinstalled by school admin and i had no clue where it was . luckily, you have voodoo's sample files to go off of, but if you really want, u can always google for sample files (coming from experience, they may require a bit of searching though =\)

(to summarize)
-you can either use voodoo's sample files
-get the sample files from the source
-google it
- (and if u really want, ur more then welcome to e-mail me and i'll e-mail em to u)

good luck,
uzi

[louiscyphre]

Great How To! I'm currently running your configuration!

You can make GDM (and KDM) able to run a script instead of an application just changing the "Type=Application" line in "Type=Xsession" in /usr/share/xsessions/blackbox.desktop.

An example of "blackbox.desktop":

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Blackbox
Comment=Highly configurable and low resource X11 Window manager
Exec=/usr/bin/blackbox_startup
Terminal=False
TryExec=/usr/bin/blackbox_startup
Icon=blackbox.xpm
Type=Xsession

This will execute automatically "/usr/bin/blackbox_startup" when you log in.
Hope this help

[McAbre]

Thanks for a great HOW To. Was a big help. =)

Got a few problems I've been fighting with for a lil while...

1. when I run Nautilus, it starts gnome, and then I can't get to menus etc. (doesn't load the gnome toolbars and things... so I have to hit ctrl-alt-backspace to get out.)

2. I tried to add the Esetroot -line to my style file, but it did nothing. If I execute the line in terminal, then Eterm works fine, but... that's no fun. ;D

and 3. not really important cause I don't need conky, but when I run it, it resets the menus and I have to edit them back with bbconf. No idea why it does that.

-M