Beyond the Sky

I have play around a lots of fluxbox svn version over the weekend, and discover a bug on windows title, while display non-english characters while you login with en-UTF-8 locale.

fluxbox

Observed that the windows title, it could not recognize the font and display correctly, even I overlay it with chinese font in ~/.fluxbox/overlay. But in gtk part of space, observe the tab, it do works to display properly.

Any Chinese fluxbox user facing the same problem?
Probably not if you login as a zh locale, what if you login to en locale and need the windows title to display properly? In gnome, they do not have such problem, in fluxbox they have, who can fix it? which developer should I email to?

Indeed it shows the capabilities of berly, and it is a very fancy desktop. But I just can't use this kind of desktop, its full of eye candy and I will get bored after using it for long and find it irritating.

Anyway, it is cool to show off to friends who actually bought windows vista or think of buying windows vista.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKEcz_OTTBk

This is the first request of mine that can't be fulfill by just edit the configuration file. I need to hack the source code, lucky my fluxbox is compiled myself, so that can be done easily.

What is my requirement?
I need to maximize the windows when I double click on the title bar of the windows. By default, it will be shaded instead of maximize.Asking around in the #fluxbox channel, people throw me this
http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php/Howto_Make_dblclick_titlebar_maximize

Simply How?
The source code is in src folder. Edit Windows.cc, search for

frame().setOnClickTitlebar(shade_cmd, 1,true); // doubleclick with button 1

and replace it to

frame().setOnClickTitlebar(maximize_cmd, 1,true); // doubleclick with button 1

Save the file, and you now can configure, make and make install.

Refers to http://my.opera.com/mysurface/blog/i-recompile-my-fluxbox-from-source for compilation.

Computer user usually beautify their desktop when they just install a new OS, having free time, discover new themes etc. With murrine gtk2 cairo engine installed, you can make your desktop looks nice, and it is light weight.

Murrine have ability to change:
1. Menubar style
2. ListHeader style
3. Menubar Items
4. Style of the Glaze
5. Scrollbar Colors
6. Contrast

Murrine support:
1. Square all the theme
2. Animations ( on progress bar)

Screenshot?

This is one of the sample Murrina Kent uses murrine engine.

Ok, what should I install?
If you are using ubuntu, you can do as bellow:

wget http://malteo.homelinux.net/B54820BC.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Add the lines bellow to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://malteo.homelinux.net edgy-malteo all
deb-src http://malteo.homelinux.net edgy-malteo all

# sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gtk2-engines-murrine

Ok, you need to download themes,
You can search around at http://gnome-look.org/ and http://xfce-look.org/ . Those themes uses murrine will usually have keyword murrina***

I find this nice too, but you need to do some modification, else it won't works.
(replace squaredstyle = 0 to roundness = 1)
http://www.kernow-webhosting.com/~bvc/theme/gtk/murrine/

Downloaded theme can extract at ~/.themes then to use apply the theme, can uses gnome-theme-manager. ( Simply goto system -> preference -> theme for gnome user.)

If you using fluxbox on top of ubuntu, add the line bellow to ~/.fluxbox/startup

gnome-settings-daemon &

What else?
You can modify the theme, its a text with options, edit the file gtkrc in the theme folder you have extract, search "murrine", and all the option can be configure easily. The author create a murrine configurator for easy configuration too, but some how the official murrine site cannot be access by my side. Thanks to linux toy, I able to download the murrine configurator at here

You wanna see all your results at once, with all the controls everything in one windows, use The Widget Factory.


Get it from http://linuxappfinder.com/package/thewidgetfactory

Have fun!

If you use scim for input, and you want to work with skype, you need to get skype-static. Skype will not work, you will get core dump if you default input is scim! I just wanna cut it short, if your default input is scim, download skype-static from http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-static

You will get a file with filename such as skype_staticQT-1.3.0.53-generic.tar.bz2, then unzip it and do as follow:

Extract to a location, example

sudo tar xjvf skype_staticQT-1.3.0.53-generic.tar.bz2 -C /opt

Make a symlink

sudo ln -s /opt/skype-1.3.0.53/skype /usr/bin/skype

Thats it!