Now using Fluxbox on Ubuntu 9.04

Solutions

Since I just described some problems with Fluxbox out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 9.04, it would only be decent of me to share the solutions I’ve found to those issues, so that any readers who might be playing around with Fluxbox on this platform might avoid some of the troubleshooting I had to go through to figure this stuff out.

So I’ll go back through my list and describe what I have done to get around these items.

• Can’t permanently disable the touchpad
  Sadly, I haven’t figured this one out yet. If anyone has any suggestions, do let me know. If one can’t disable the touchpad in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I don’t honestly have any idea where else one would do it.
• Mouse-wheeling over the Fluxbox toolbar does not switch workspaces
  Not sure why this was necessary, as I’ve never had to manually enter this into the /~/.fluxbox/keys file before to get this functionality, but I discovered on Fluxbox-wiki.org this syntax that needed to be added to my keys file:

  OnToolbar Mouse4 :NextWorkspace
OnToolbar Mouse5 :PrevWorkspace

• Double clicking on the titlebar of windows does nothing
  This was another problem whose solution was a simple addition of a few lines to the Fluxbox keys file. Again, I have no idea why this was necessary — maybe it’s the way Patrick Volkerding packages Fluxbox in his Slackware releases (which is the only other way I’ve used Fluxbox, to be honest) — but edit your /~/.fluxbox/keys file and add (one of) the following to it:

  (to maximize)
  OnTitlebar Double Mouse1 :MaximizeWindow

  (or, if you prefer, to shade)
  OnTitlebar Double Mouse1 :Shade

• Right clicking on the titlebar of windows does nothing
  Yep. You guessed it. This functionality was something else that needed to be added manually to the /~/.fluxbox/keys file:

  OnTitlebar Mouse3 :WindowMenu

• No wireless!!!!
  This was just a matter of figuring out what GNOME uses as a daemon to talk to the wireless device on this machine. I found this via Googling all over the place, and remedied the situation by adding one simple line to my /~/.fluxbox/startup file’s “Applications you want to run with fluxbox” section:

  nm-applet &

As an added bit of necessity (for me, anyway), I added another couple of lines to my /~/.fluxbox/startup file right after the “nm-applet &” line, to start up my Xscreensaver daemon, and to fire up GKrellM:

xscreensaver --nosplash &
gkrellm &

After all this, Fluxbox on Ubuntu 9.04 seems to be behaving itself so far. I of course manually edited my /~/.fluxbox/menu to add in the apps I normally use and like to have there, and I did some of my usual tweaks to Fluxbox, but after all this, aside from the touchpad annoyance, it looks like Fluxbox runs stable, crisp, and fast on top of Ubuntu, which is good.

I’ll post more on this subject as it comes up.

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