antiX-forum

Hello. I know there is a wiki being developed and I have also offered to help anti customize the icewm part of antix, so I see this as a way to get my ideas out there for everyone to share in. Here's what I have so far:

1. There are 3 missing config files. Copy them from /usr/share/icewm to ~/.icewm as user:

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cp /usr/share/icewm/keys ~/.icewm
cp /usr/share/icewm/preferences ~/.icewm
cp /usr/share/icewm/winoptions ~/.icewm

2. To make icewm a little more usable, I suggest editing ~/.icewm/preferences as follows:

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leafpad ~/.icewm/preferences

MenuMouseTracking=1
TaskBarShowCollapseButton=1

ClockCommand="osmo"
RunCommand="fbrun"
ShutdownCommand="sudo halt"
RebootCommand="sudo reboot"
MailCommand="claws-mail"
CPUStatusCommand="wterm -tr +sb -fg white -T "Htop" -e htop"
NetStatusCommand="/opt/wicd/gui.py"

Just find the lines, uncomment them, and edit as suggested.

3. If you would like to add themes, create the folder ~/.icewm/themes and extract the tarballs to that directory.

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mkdir ~/.icewm/themes

Most themes have an icon for xterm, but not for wterm. So the result is a "wterm" button on your toolbar instead of the terminal icon from your theme. Here's a fix:

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leafpad ~/.icewm/toolbar

Edit it as follows:

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prog wterm xterm wterm -tr +sb -fg white -T "antiX"

4. Add a mixer to your toolbar. Add the following to ~/.icewm/toolbar:

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prog "Mixer" /usr/share/pixmaps/icon_aumix.xpm aumix

Or you could just use your keyboard with some predefined keys. Look in ~/.icewm/keys and you will see that there are some keys already defined for raising/lowering the volume using aumix.

5. Now would be a good time to log out and try your new icewm settings.

Some items for the future:
1. editing the menu (for this project I will use icemc from the repos)
2. porting config-user to icewm
3. additional tweaks as I learn more (for example, the absolute project found a way to include a volume slider on the taskbar. that's cool)

Peace Out.

john

Thanks! I forgot about that. I just replaced "gmrun" with "fbrun" and it works fine. I'm glad I started this thread!

BTW: Would you prefer that I keep a dark theme to compliment the fb theme or go in a different direction such as milk, blue, vista, etc.? Thanks.

john

Bump - just wanted to let folks know that I've made some improvements. Thanks.

john

Thanks. I found a few cool things, but I'll need more time to explore.

- edit - I have a bad install? so the following is based on this install

I just found a problem - from my perspective anyway - with icewm: trayicons. Icewm doesn't seem to have a lot of support for this. I did find a couple of workarounds:

1. Right-click on the window title bar and choose tray icon.
2. For some apps - like osmo - it is critical that you remember to do this since it doesn't quit just because you close the window. So if you edit ~/.icewm/winoptions with something like

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osmo.icon:/usr/share/pixmaps/osmo.png
osmo.tray:Exclusive

then a tray icon will appear when osmo is launched. But this trick didn't work so well with vlc - an app that can be controlled with the tray icon.

So here's my solution: use lxpanel (remember, lxde was originally paired with icewm). Here's how:

1. Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list as described here:
http://lxde.sourceforge.net/download.html
Then do

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apt-get update
apt-get install lxpanel


2. Edit ~/.icewm/preferences to turn off the panel:

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ShowTaskBar=0 # 0/1

3. Install and use the lxice theme (optional, but it looks nice). Get it from here:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/lxice/

4. Now make a startup file to launch programs at startup and save it as ~/.icewm/startup.

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#!/bin/bash

conky &
lxpanel &
eval `cat ~/.fehbg` &

The first and last lines are optional. Now make it executable.

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chmod +x ~/.icewm/startup

Now edit ~/.xinitrc so that the startup file will launch during startup.

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exec icewm-session

5. Here's a nice little theme that I think goes well with lxice and lxpanel:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/jswatercolor/
You will also need to install the package "gtk2-engines-pixbuf" from the repos if you want to use it. You will also have to unpack it to ~/.themes (and create the directory if you haven't already). And finally launch switch and switch2 to choose the new gtk and gtk2 js-watercolor themes.

6. Now logout/login to see what happens. Hopefully, it's all good.

john[/code]

If you're using my suggestion of using lxpanel and the lxice theme, then I suggest some more modifications:

1. Enable the logout command from the start menu (this will launch the logout dialog from the fluxbox menu). See this thread:
http://antix.freeforums.org/configure-l ... .html#4423

2. Edit the look of lxpanel to better match lxice.
a. Right-click on the panel and choose panel-settings.
b. Click the radio button background>none
c. Uncheck font>custom color

john

Here's a tip I found at www.psychocats.net

Hit [windows key] + [space bar] and a run dialog box will appear in the task bar. Pretty cool.

john

I think I was at the wicd site looking for a way to get a tray icon for wicd. They had some code which created startup file. However, I couldn't get it to execute. More recently, I found a nice icewm piece at psychocats: http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/icewm and this provided the extra info I needed. Formerly I edited ~/.xinitrc to get programs to launch for icewm, but of course they launched while starting other wm's as well. So the startup file fixed all that. See the above post for info:

4. Now make a startup file to launch programs at startup.

Code:
#!/bin/bash

conky &
lxpanel &
eval `cat ~/.fehbg` &

The first and last lines are optional. Now make it executable.

Code:
chmod +x ~/.icewm/startup

Now edit ~/.xinitrc so that the startup file will launch during startup.

Code:
exec icewm-session

john

Well, as it turns out I must have hosed my installation - tray icons are working just fine on my other antix box. (Also, on the hosed box I can't get the net load monitor to appear - so a second indication that something's wrong.) However, if you love lxpanel, then the above post will guide you through it. Or you can keep the minimalist feel of icewm and use their panel, which is quite good - when it's not hosed.

john

Bump - I did some looking around and found that most themes have a terminal icon included - usually called "xterm". So I edited ~/.icewm/toolbar to point to the xterm icon instead of the non-existent wterm icon. Please see the first post for details.

john