Kickstarting an openbox project

[skellat]

So, what would it take for an openbox-desktop metapackage to be created?

[canthus13]

I'm not really sure... I'll be looking into that after I mow the lawn tomorrow.

Jason

[canthus13]

Hmm.. at first glance, it appears that the first step is to put together the exact system we want. Once I have a machine dedicated to this, I can do a clean install from a minimal CD and add exactly what we want. The hard part with this is that several packages we'd need are not included in the repos, so we'd have to build and maintain the packages as well.

Jason

[skellat]

There's likely going to need to be some PPA action then?

[canthus13]

At first, but the packages will have to make it into the repos eventually.

[skellat]

Are there any hardware needs on your end, canthus13, that would need to be met before building could take place?

[canthus13]

A hard drive... ~20gb would be perfect. other than that, I've got a machine that will do just fine. My old sauerbraten server (which didn't die after all... It decided to boot back up) will be the guinea pig. I'll need to scare up another mouse as well, but I think I have one lurking around somewhere. as soon as I have that, I can start with a minimal CD and pull things together to build a first draft, so to speak. I've got most of the packages and features I want already set up on my main system, but it was built on a gnome install, so I'm not quite sure what needs to stay and what can go.

Jason

[canthus13]

Ok. Now that I've got 10.04 working in vmware player (11.04 wouldn't work...), here's a starting setup. I installed the 10.04 mini cd with *NO* packages selected. All of these packages so far are available in the repos, and will get you to where I am with little effort other than adding stuff to autostart and rc.xml

openbox                 # Openbox.
xinit                   # This installs a host of other packates that get Xorg up and running
gnome-terminal          # Most other terminals I've tested don't pass control characters properly to applications running inside
tint2                   # task list/clock/tasktray
wicd                    # network configuration tool 
nitrogen                # wallpaper manager
gmrun                   # This gives us our alt-f2 box
chromium-browser        # not much to say here... it's a web browser.
obmenu                  # openbox menu configuration tool
obconf                  # openbox configuration
slim                    # login manager -May change to lightdm once I can install natty on a regular machine as slim doesn't support remote login

~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh

# Run the system-wide support stuff
. $GLOBALAUTOSTART
# Programs to launch at startup
tint2 &				# Taskbar and tasktray
nitrogen --restore & 		# Restore the background
wicd-client & 			# wicd Network manager

insert this into ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml under <!-- Keybindings for window switching -->

<keybind key="A-F2">
      <action name="execute">
        <execute>gmrun</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

If you want the menu.xml, I'll post that too.

[canthus13]

I now have tint2 0.11 working on my main machine after some initial issues caused by stupid default behavior. Next step is to package it, which is something I've never done before...

Jason

[canthus13]

Just a quick note - I've started up ##openbox-desktop on freenode to kind of keep the discussion from taking over the LoCo channel.