antiX-forum

Working now with Preview, and have had some desktop issues:

--top and bottom gray bars started showing up on the sides, and continued even after a fresh install--anybody else?
--I removed icons one at a time, then right-clicked to expand black over the gray bars. Is this the way to get rid of them?
--I tried adding "conky &" to the bottom of ~./fluxbox/startup, but when I reboot conky shows up for a flash then disappears. Suspect it may have to do with the way I got rid of the gray bars, but am not sure.

TIA

I'm not sure what you mean by the gray bars but I believe the preview is using rox desktop by default and will not allow you to run conky. I think it's still running but it's under the desktop. The bars may also have something to do with rox-desktop.

eriefisher

Got it, thanks. Opened up Fluxbox startup, commented out Rox desktop, now works fine.

If it's the icons and panel your after you might want to look at setting up idesk and pypanel. I been playing with it on a test box here. Have a look.

http://antix.freeforums.org/it-just-kee ... -t579.html

eriefisher

Nice!

I'm not interested in icons, thanks. This is my laptop and I like the basic fluxbox thing. I had found a way to put my wireless information in conky (posted here) and wanted to duplicate that with the new version.

Thanks for the observations Jerry.

An important point comes out of this. If antiX comes with Rox-desktop set by default, then users should be made aware that conky will not work (properly by default, but it will work with a lot of fiddling about) and the change wallpaper in the fluxbox menu won't work either as it changes the root desktop wallpaper not the one used by the rox-desktop. To change the rox-desktop wallpaper, you have to do so through the wallpaper app in the /home/username/rox folder.

So the million euro/dollar/pound/yen/et al question is:

Should antiX default to a rox-desktop as in preview1 or to its usual non-desktop, but have the rox-desktop available as a choice?

Tough decisions...

Well first: I'll take the million euros over the million dollars at the moment.

Second: my personal preference is for the original fluxbox w/o the Rox desktop. But it depends on how you conceive of your target audience, I guess.

In starting the FAQs, the third question I came up with was: "Where are the icons?", so in my mind it is definitely a question people will ask early in their exposure to antiX.

Is there any way to have a small config file that is written to by an Edit Fluxbox menu entry and simply gives the user a choice between the two. Then that is read dynamically by the actual config file when Fluxbox boots? Not sure what I am talking about here, just drifting around...

Nobody has mentioned the Rox panel as a default compromise--? As far as I can see, you can boot into a clean fluxbox, with a nice conky display and a range of key icons running along the panel for new users.

For me i'd rather have the plain fluxbox setup and then have the option to choose other setups (Rox, Pinboard etc) if so desired. I really love the whole ROX idea, and the software is great, but i've always had problems with getting it set up correctly, and i still fail to see the advantages of having the pinboard in the first place.

* eeriefisher - That idesk setup looks great.... so much so that i'm going to have a go myself. Is it difficult to set up and get going? I've edited the TinyMe version before (To change the position of the icons) so i know about that part at least, but i've never set it up from scratch before.

Preview came with Rox set up as default for me.

The more I think about it, the better I think it would be to stick with Fluxbox as the default. Though functional, Rox is not elegant, and Rox seemed unstable here (hence my talking about the gray bars). Finally, I just don't think it fits the concept.

I tried the preview and everything seems fine, nice incremental improvements, main advantage being updated mepis kernel and packages and improved wireless support, several good choices there which should suit everyone.

And another vote for fluxbox as default and rox desktop as option. I like the rox filer and rox terminal but prefer the fluxbox desktop by a long way. antiX has such a good fluxbox setup it seems a shame to not have it as default, or have some of the new control centre options not work as expected (like wallpaper changes).

* eeriefisher - That idesk setup looks great.... so much so that i'm going to have a go myself. Is it difficult to set up and get going? I've edited the TinyMe version before (To change the position of the icons) so i know about that part at least, but i've never set it up from scratch before.

Once you figure out how the .idesk file works it's pretty simple. Watch out for the background settings, it will conflict with fluxbox settings. The icons are drag and drop to anywhere on the desktop once you have them set up. I can send you my config files if you want.

eriefisher

eriefisher wrote:Once you figure out how the .idesk file works it's pretty simple. Watch out for the background settings, it will conflict with fluxbox settings. The icons are drag and drop to anywhere on the desktop once you have them set up. I can send you my config files if you want.

eriefisher

I'll definitely take you up on that offer eeriefisher, and thank you for it.

With regards to the background, do you use still use feh & fluxbox for the wallpaper/background or using idesk do you use something else?

I also didn't know that you could "Drag & Drop" the icons to place them.... when i played around with idesk on TinyMe i had to edit the config files manually, so drag & drop will be quite a time saver!

Many thanks once again.

Let me know where to send them.

For the background set idesk to "none" or just comment them out and you can use fluxbox to set it and avoid conflict.

idesk sets up a grid of cells that you determine the size of. You must also state the icon size accordingly. The icon then just "snaps" to the center of the "cell". If you make the icons small and the grid large they will be further apart and so on.

http://idesk.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Idesk-usage

eriefisher

eriefisher wrote:Let me know where to send them.

Thanks for that.... i've sent a PM.

For the background set idesk to "none" or just comment them out and you can use fluxbox to set it and avoid conflict.

I'll probably stick with fluxbox for now, as feh works so well on antiX.

idesk sets up a grid of cells that you determine the size of. You must also state the icon size accordingly. The icon then just "snaps" to the center of the "cell". If you make the icons small and the grid large they will be further apart and so on.

http://idesk.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Idesk-usage

eriefisher

Wow, that's really cool!! I didn't know it was that flexible. OOi, do you just grab icons from various sources & use them (jpg's, png's, xpm's etc) or are there icons supplied?