Originally Posted by
sudodus
Sharing results is valuable for the community
Well, here goes but I'm not really systematic and may have missed something or not written things in a logical order. As I said, this is purely limited to trying out the Openbox session available at the time of logging in on a system running Lubuntu 13.04.
At the outset one can exit an Openbox session by typing openbox --exit at a terminal prompt and that gets you back to the login screen. Many changes suggested here may require changing themes back and forth or logging out and back in or possibly a reboot.
After logging in to an Openbox session, a plain grey (#303030) screen is all one gets. To change that to another color, create ~/.config/openbox/autostart and add this line:
Code:
xsetroot -solid "#000005"
or other color of choice. One can also point to a wallpaper but I didn't go there.
Right-clicking on the screen brings up a menu from which one can choose applications to run. The choice of applications doesn't reflect what you have installed on your system if you've removed some software and added some other software. If you're going to rely on this right-click menu a lot, you'll need to fix that by copying over /etc/xdg/openbox/menu.xml to ~/.config/openbox and modifying it to reflect the software you want to access. I understand there's OBmenu to provide a GUI but again, I didn't go there.
Since I'm already a Lubuntu user, I have lxpanel installed and configured the way I like it. To get lxpanel running at startup, add one more line to ~/.config/openbox/autostart so that it looks like:
Code:
xsetroot -solid "#000005"
lxpanel --profile Lubuntu &
Again, since I'm already a Lubuntu user, I have modified ~/.config/openbox/lubuntu-rc.xml quite a bit to have the keyboard shortcuts I want. But an Openbox session needs to see just rc.xml. I don't know if a logical link would do; for now I copied lubuntu-rc.xml to rc.xml in the same folder.
Note that in 14.04, just making a copy of lubuntu-rc.xml and calling it rc.xml won't do. This is because many of the keyboard shortcuts have command lines with "lxsession-default" in them; they also don't refer to executables directly but to their generic names. So, you'll see "lxsession-default file_manager" in lubuntu-rc.xml but you'll need just "pcmanfm" (or the actual executable for your file manager) in rc.xml. As another example, you'll need "lxterminal" instead of "lxsession-default terminal". In other words, if you're using lubuntu-rc.xml as a starting point for your rc.xml, you'll need to fix lines containing "lxsession-default" if you want the respective keyboard shortcuts to work.
Now to the appearance of the panel and applications. I found that my icon theme and gtk theme wasn't effective and that fonts in gtk applications looked bad. The "Openbox" aspect of things was unaffected: in other words, window decorations were unaffected.
Lxappearance (Customize Look and Feel) was unhelpful for changing the "widget" theme and icon theme. I had to make the following edits to various files:
Edit ~/.gtkrc-2.0 to include the following two lines:
Code:
include "/home/your_username/.themes/gtk_theme_name/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"
gtk-icon-theme-name = "icon_theme_name"
Edit ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini to include
Code:
gtk-theme-name = gtk_theme_name
gtk-icon-theme-name = icon_theme_name
After doing all this, fonts in the panel and in gtk apps were still a problem: they were much thinner in the Openbox session. (Font appearance in the window decoration were unaffected) To fix that, I added one more line to ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini:
Code:
gtk-theme-name = gtk_theme_name
gtk-icon-theme-name = icon_theme_name
gtk-font-name = Comic Sans MS
and created ~/.Xresources with the following content (from the bottom of http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Better_Font_Rendering):
Code:
! Render setting for cairo -> pango -> gtk
Xft.dpi: 96
Xft.antialias: true
Xft.hinting: true
Xft.rgba: rgb
Xft.hintstyle: hintslight
Now my Openbox session looks fine.
Overall, I feel there may not be "great" performance gains to users of Lubuntu 13.04 as the Lubuntu session is pretty light to start with but there may be gains for those with older kits. I don't know!
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