Is The OpenBox Project...DEAD?

[izizzle]

Well, it's been more than a year since they released the last version of openbox (3.4.7.1) (http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Openbox:News) and the fact that a version 3.4.7.2 has not come out yet makes me a little bit suspicious. What do you guys think?

[izizzle]

Bump. Anyone have thoughts on this?

[durand]

https://www.ohloh.net/p/openbox/commits

I doubt its dead as so many people use it.. I guess they don't have much to add to the codebase?

[izizzle]

But there are bugs nonetheless.

[durand]

Mmmm, I have to say, it works perfectly for me on gentoo and crunchbang. I guess the main devs have moved on but as I said, its very popular and I'm sure it will be updated.

[Dullstar]

Honestly, I don't know if Openbox is dead or not. I've heard of it, but never used it. Adding it to my desktop environments right now!

[durand]

If you want to try openbox, you should try it with crunchbang linux first. They've done an amazing job with showcasing it. It's based on ubuntu as well so you may be able to install it within ubuntu.

[RedSquirrel]

Well, it's been more than a year since they released the last version of openbox (3.4.7.1) (http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Openbox:News) and the fact that a version 3.4.7.2 has not come out yet makes me a little bit suspicious. What do you guys think?

3.4.7.2 has been out since 23-Apr-2008. I guess they just didn't bother to make a News item for it. See the download (http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Openbox:Download) page. That version is available in the Ubuntu repositories:


sudo apt-get install openboxThere is a tarball of 3.4.8-rc1 [06-Nov-2008] here (http://icculus.org/openbox/releases/openbox-3.4.8-rc1.tar.gz).

The git repository summary (http://git.icculus.org/?p=mikachu/openbox.git;a=summary) says: last change Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:45:47 +0000

I don't know if it's dead. The dev(s) might just be busy with other things. They might get around to working on it again at some point.

In my experience, 3.4.7.2 is stable and works well. A while ago, I used 3.4.8-rc1 for a short period of time and it seemed OK too. If you're running Ubuntu, you'll be fine with the openbox package from the repositories.

[Dullstar]

Tried running it, but it wouldn't load. I don't really feel like bothering getting it to work.

[durand]

Tried running it, but it wouldn't load. I don't really feel like bothering getting it to work.

*box window managers are really annoying to setup but once you have them working, they are really nice.

You should really try crunchbang before giving up. They have a live cd as well.

[Dullstar]

I don't even know what Crunchbang is! By the way, is there any major difference between OpenBox and Fluxbox?

[RedSquirrel]

Tried running it, but it wouldn't load. I don't really feel like bothering getting it to work.
Did it load a dark grey background with nothing but your mouse pointer? That's openbox.

It doesn't come with any panels or desktop icons etc.

[durand]

http://crunchbanglinux.org/

It has everything you want to know on the homepage.

There are a few differences between fluxbox and openbox. They were both based on blackbox code but since then, openbox was rewritten. I find openbox faster than fluxbox but its really your choice. Fluxbox and openbox also have different menu systems. Openbox has pipemenus which basically lets you dynamically create menus from the output of a program.
I guess you just have to try them to see their difference.