What is Openbox?

From the Openbox homepage, “Openbox is a minimalistic, highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support.”  From using it, I often think of it as fluxbox-like with the benefits of being able to dip into Gnome or KDE for the items that I want to use.  Your desktop will then run with speed and simplicity using only the elements you want to use with it.

So…Let’s get Started…

This How-To will assume that you’re running Foresight Linux, you’re logged into Gnome and that you’re familiar with conary, the package manager for Foresight.  First and foremost, install openbox:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ sudo conary update openbox obmenu obconf

This installs the needed components to run Openbox on your system. Openbox is minimal by default though so if you login to the environment now for the first time, there will be no taskbars, nothing…just a large blank area for you to work with. We will need to install some extra components to give a bit more functionality. If you’d like a panel menu, I recommend using tint2. I used to use pypanel which is a small panel written in python but this panel is no longer developed.

There are other panels that are packaged with openbox in mind for Foresight; fbpanel is available, which is a very fast and functional menu bar. I like lxpanel also, which is fbpanel with some easier configuration options. For a full list, please see openbox documentation. For our purposes here, we will install tint2:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ sudo conary update tint2

Now we need to copy the default configuration file for tint2 so we can build our panel to our liking.  You’ll have to create the default path for the tint2rc configuration file.  To do this and copy the config file:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ mkdir -p ~/.config/tint2/
[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ cp /etc/xdg/tint2/tint2rc ~/.config/tint2/

Now tint2 has a configuration file in place and is ready for Openbox to start.

Let the Configuration Begin!

The hard part (install) is now out of the way thanks to the conary package manager. Now we need to configure Openbox so that it’s ready for us when we log out of Gnome. The configuration files will need to be copied to /home/user/.config/openbox.  Of course, this path doesn’t exist yet so we’ll need to create it like this:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ mkdir -p ~/.config/openbox/

Visiting there now will show that there aren’t any files in this directory.  The file we’ll absolutely need to place there is autostart.sh. Other files that will be in here are rc.xml which is for obconf (openbox configuration) and menu.xml (openbox menu system).  We’ll copy menu.xml from a default copy there later.  The other file should auto-create when loading for the first time (rc.xml)

The autostart.sh file is what starts all of our services and our tint2 panel we just installed as well as setup our wallpaper and other items.  Instead of going through the options you can place in here, I’m going to share my autostart.sh to get you up and running quickly.  Please note that if you chose not to install fbpanel and use the gnome-panel or other panel instead, you’ll need to comment the pypanel line below and uncomment what you’ll be using:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$  cat autostart.sh
# This shell script is run before Openbox launches.
# Environment variables set here are passed to the Openbox session.
##############################################################
# Panel Section
##############################################################
# pypanel, my favorite panel for openbox
#(sleep 3 && pypanel) &
# Use the wbar Launcher if you would like.  Don't forget to install it before uncommenting
# wbar &
(sleep 3 && tint2) &

#############################################################
# Gnome Integration Section
#############################################################
# This section let's Gnome give us some of its desktopiness
gnome-power-manager &
nm-applet --sm-disable &
/usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon &
gnome-volume-manager --sm-disable &
gnome-keyring-daemon &

###########################################################
# Other Add-on's for Openbox
###########################################################
# Make your wallpaper restore to last setting using Nitrogen.
nitrogen --restore &
parcellite &
volumeicon &
################################# End ###################

Download my autostart.sh

To create the menu system file for openbox, we’ll copy from the default installation to our .config/openbox directory (so we can use obmenu…otherwise, that command will give us an error) so use the following command in a terminal:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ cp /etc/xdg/openbox/menu.xml ~/.config/openbox/

Now you’re ready to login and reap what you have sown Logout of Gnome and change sessions in GDM to Openbox.  Notice that your tint2 panel starts up and has the gnome applications we recorded in the autostart.sh file above running and docked! You can add more options to your autostart.sh file and you can also edit tint2rc (in your /home/user/.config/tint2 directory) to store settings for your panel.

I’ve Installed and am Running, Now What?

Now you get to customize the Openbox menu with your favorite applications. Menus are activated by right clicking anywhere on the desktop. There are a few default applications…I choose obconf right away so that I can choose a theme I like and increase the text size since I’m using a high resolution. After that is done, I right click for the menu again and go to applications >> xterm. When the terminal pops up, I type obmenu. From there, I’ll be able to edit my right click menu.

Now instead of entering obmenu in a terminal each time, let’s add it to our right click options. In the obmenu window that you opened in the last paragraph, expand the Openbox 3 option. Find obconf and highlight it. Click ‘new item’ and add obmenu for a label, execute for action, and obmenu for Execute. This will add obmenu to your right click options so you don’t have to open a terminal each time to do things. You can also customize any of the items you find in applications…I put a few things I normally need such as thunderbird, firefox, gnome-terminal, etc. Feel free to add whatever you need…you can have many submenu’s . It’s setup is pretty straightforward.

Nitrogen, the wallpaper manager, requires a small tweak as well to get working. What I did was create a /home/username/Photos/Wallpaper directory and then loaded it up with my favorite desktop wallpaper. Good places to go for cool wallpapers are desktopography.com and vladstudio.com.  Next, install Nitrogen:

[devnet@lostlap Desktop]$ sudo conary update Nitrogen

After your first login, you’ll need to add a menu entry using obmenu to call the nitrogen browser. So create the menu entry and the action you call is:

nitrogen /home/username/Photos/wallpaper

Of course, replace ‘username’ with your users name.  This will allow you to open up all the wallpaper photos inside of that directory.

So What Have we Done?

Today, we’ve installed Openbox on Foresight Linux. We’ve given it a tint2 panel so we have a place to dock applications and we’ve customized the Openbox right click menu and added a wallpaper program called Nitrogen. Hopefully, this shows you the customizable features of Openbox and also shows you the speed that Openbox operates at. It’s a very minimalistic environment, yet one that can be very powerful.

Installation Notes of Interest

tint2

Tint2 is my newly crowned favorite panel for openbox.  It’s lightweight and is able to be configured in so many ways.  I added the sleep command inside my autostart.sh to make sure that the desktop is loaded before the tint2 panel tries to load…mostly, this is due to network manager wanting to animate while the panel loads.  This isn’t as much problem with tint2 as it is with pypanel (see below).

pypanel

Some things I’ve noticed when running openbox…network manager has problems with pypanel. I added the sleep command inside my autostart.sh and this is much better now…but there may be similar problems with network manager. It’s really NM searching for a network and it causes the panel to flicker a bit. Not a real show stopper.

Gnome-panel

Gnome-panel running inside openbox causes a few errors to pop up when I login. This could be due to the fact that I’ve started things in my autostart.sh out of order…I’m also not all together sure what is causing these errors. The problem seems to be with the docking area of gnome-panel as when I minimize programs they are not docked. Easily fixable, but annoying nonetheless.

Alternative Panels

There are quite a few alternative panels out there.  Fbpanel is one.  Perlpanel is another.  Fbpanel and lxpanel are available in the Foresight repositories. You can also add other launchers like wbar if you so desire.

Screenshot

Openbox on Foresight

Installing Openbox on Foresight Linux originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on May 30, 2010.

Working on a separate 20 inch monitor with a distribution in development however is another story. The fonts didn’t look beautiful at all. After some installation of custom fonts, things looked better, but the resolution is a bit higher on this LCD at 1400×1050. Easy to fix right? Just increase the DPI in the KDE Control Center to 120 right? Not so fast…even when it’s set to 96×96 there, it isn’t always set to 96×96. So let’s take a look at how you can force KDE to run at the correct DPI for your monitor which will, in turn, make your fonts look MUCH better. For those of you who are satisfied with your fonts, you might want to check out the commands below to see if you’re running at the DPI you think you are.

Open Konsole and let’s check your resolution:

xdpyinfo | grep dimension

This will tell you what the actual resolution of X is on your desktop. Next, look at the DPI setting.

xdpyinfo | grep resolution

Surprised? I was. I found that at the high resolution I was running at, the DPI was set to 86×86 despite my attempts to force it to 96×96 in the KDE Control Center.

So how does one combat this? It takes a bit of calculation with a formula followed by a one line entry into your xorg.conf. Easy enough? Almost too easy…couldn’t the KDE programmers, say, employ a control center menu for this? It’s possible…let’s hope it’s in KDE 4.0.

FORMULA

First, the formula. Using the dimensions you found above, you’ll have to calculate 2 numbers…one for horizontal and one for vertical. As my resolution is 1400×1050, I will use this as the example. The formula is as follows:

displaysize = (<pixelsize>/DPI-Desired)*25.4

In my case, displaysize = (1400/100)*25.4. This equals 355. I wrote this down for later. Now I need to use 1050 (my vertical setting for resolution 1400×1050) in the same formula (displaysize =(1050/100)*25.4) which comes out to 266. Keep these two numbers handy…remember, if you want 96 or 120 DPI for your monitor…sub in those numbers for the DPI-Desired and divide your resolution by them as shown in the formula above.

EDIT XORG.CONF

Open up xorg.conf in your favorite text editor..for example, my favorite is kate so I issue the following command: Alt-F2 (a run dialog pops up) >> kdesu kate /etc/X11/xorg.conf. You’ll be prompted for your root password to access this file. After it opens, find the “Monitor” section. Just before “EndSection” place a line like the following (substitute the values you found using the formula above):

DisplaySize 355 266 # 1400×1050 100dpi

Your display size may be different…just remember to place horizontal first, followed by vertical. Now you’ll need to restart X. Close all your applications and hit Control-Alt-Backspace. Log back in and issue the command we used previously for DPI:

xdpyinfo | grep resolution

If you followed the directions above correctly, your altered DPI settings should display. Gnome does this through a handy menu that’s very easy to use. It’s head and shoulders above what KDE does with fonts and setting DPI. Using Gnome at work for the past 4 months has shown me the many areas that KDE falls behind…but it also shows me the many areas where Gnome just doesn’t get the job done. In this case, KDE fails horribly on configuring DPI for nice looking fonts. Luckily, I was able to assemble information from various places on the web to get the job done. The page that helped me the most was Matt Parnell’s Brain, a weblog that had an entry with this formula. I wanted to reproduce the information here with a bit more hand holding so new users would be able to use the tip without getting confused. Hopefully, this helps!

KDE and Xorg, Fonts and DPI originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on September 20, 2007.

Alt-F2
Brings up a “Run Command” prompt

Alt-Print and Cntrl-Print
Take a screenshot. You have to paste it from your clipboard

Alt-Esc or Control-Esc
Shows the KDE session manager, from which you can switch to a specific application or log out of KDE.

Ctrl-F[1..8]
Switch to a specific desktop.

Alt-Tab or Alt-Shift-Tab
Cycle through your windows.

Ctrl-Tab or Ctrl-Shift-Tab
Cycle through your desktops.

Alt-F4
Close the current active window.

Ctrl-Alt-Esc
Window destroyer (every window you click on will be destroyed).

Alt-F3
For your Window Menu

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace
This exits KDE but doesn’t save your settings or work.

Ctrl-Alt-Numpad +
Cycles to the next screen resolution available.

Ctrl-Alt-Numpad -
Cycles to the previous screen resolution available.

Hope these help you out…please post any you might have that are helpful and I’ll add them to the list with credits. Thanks again for reading.

KDE Shortcut Keys originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on January 26, 2006.

Let’s start off by seeing if the cron daemon is even running on your system. Open up a Konsole or Shell and type the following:

ps aux | grep crond

If there is output similar to that in the screenshot, we’re in business because the cron daemon is running. If not, restart cron by typing: ./usr/sbin/crond (may vary by your distro…if you need help, let me know in comments section).

I use PCLinuxOS for my Linux desktop. You can find Kcron by navigating to Kmenu >> Configuration >> Other and selecting it.

Kcron will open and you’ll see the default menu. You should see two categories in the main area: “Tasks” and “Variables”

Variables identifies items you can set to help with your task scheduling. For instance, say you want a custom variable to stand for one users’ desktop…so you’d set the PATH variable to their /desktop. Now remember, when you set this variable, Kcron will use in in lieu of the normal path. There are also other variables you can set. There is extended help on variables in the Kcron handbook. For now though, let’s look at the other item on our list…and, subsequently, the meat and potatoes of what Kcron does. Tasks.

With Tasks, you setup the command you want to execute. This can be something simple like mailing you out a synopsis of logs or even nmap penetration scans. It’s up to you what you want to do with it. We’ll start with something extemely simple to show how Kcron works.

Highlight “Tasks” then select the Edit menu and choose “New”

This should bring up a new task menu. Glancing over this menu, you can see that things are pretty self explanatory. You have dates and times, options for repeating weekly, monthly, or daily. Basically, it’s spelled out for you. This is much easier than the old way of doing crontabs where one had to enter into the crontab file and place asterisk after asterisk and remember what each one of those asterisks meant and try to keep one’s place with all the asterisks to remember which placeholder to flag to enable the cron. Now, it’s as easy as point and click.

For training purposes, we’ll setup a task that should already be setup by default in most distributions…we’ll schedule an index update for file location purposes. Just like windows uses indexing service, Linux has a built in ‘indexer’ (term is used loosely here because it is really a database of your filesystem) that we can populate and update…which you’ll want to do, especially if you install many updates. As stated earlier, this task should already be scheduled in most distributions by default. Let’s practice though by setting it up to run. Looking at the window we opened in the previous paragraph, enter in the comments “My First Linux Task – Updatedb”. Next, for the command, enter “/usr/sbin/updatedb”. Now choose when you want to run it. I chose every Wednesday of each and every month at 9:30 AM. After I set this, I choose “Ok”. Now we must save the task.

Go to File >> Save and now you’re in business. Never forget to save AFTER you’ve altered the task, otherwise your changes will go right out the window.

You can get more creative and add your own custom paths or mail addresses by using variables. As you can see in the screenshot above, I’ve input my mail address in case I want my cron output mailed to me.

Remember, as long as you know the command that you want to do, you just place it in the blank, schedule it, make sure the enable box is checked, and save. For instance, say you want to backup your files for linux to your windows share. You could use the following command to back things up into a handy tar archive:

cd /home/devnet;tar -cvf – * | tar -C /mnt/windows/share/backup -xv

The only limitation is knowledge. If ever you are in doubt of what a certain function entails, open up the Kcron handbook. It might not answer your question but you can get pointed in the right direction. Another good resource would be the developers. If there is one thing I know about KDE its that the developers are always willing answer a rogue question about the functionality of their application.

You can find both the programmers/developers of Kcron and the Kcron handbook under the help menu. Please remember that developers can answer questions about the application but are not there to come up with custom commands for you to use in Kcron…you’ll have to do that legwork yourself! Hopefully, this will get you started scheduling your own backups and tasks.

Schedule Tasks in Linux with Ease – Kcron originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on December 15, 2005.

In most KDE default KDE desktops on the major distros, you find this little icon:

That icon is Klipper, your clipboard tool. A clipboard is just what it sounds like…a place where you can clip text to be used at a later date. I wanted to take a look at where Klipper came from…so I went into the ‘about Klipper’ menu and emailed a couple of developers. A few actually responded quelling the myth that developers are unreachable by the general public. Carsten Pfeiffer, a previous developer, responded about the history of Klipper:

“It was started long time ago by Andrew Stanley-Jones, for storing a history of clipboard entries. I took over maintainership and added those annoying popups, that appeared, for example when you selected a URL in a terminal or somewhere else. The popup allowed you to do something with the URL, like opening it in Konqueror or Mozilla.

More generally speaking, the feature allowed you to configure custom “actions” to execute when something specific, described with a regular expression was put into the clipboard (see klipper’s Preferences dialog).

Later, I attempted to make klipper hide X11′s IMNSHO broken concept of “Selection” and “Clipboard”, but I didn’t really accomplish that.

Later, Lubos Lunak worked hard on fixing Qt’s clipboard implementation and making klipper play well with it and now I’m very happy that Esben is taking care of it.”

I contacted Esben in an attempt to get some inside information about where Klipper might go in the future (integration into KDE-core perhaps? or other such directions). He was able to provide a few possible directions Klipper may go:

“My vision of Klipper is mostly as a clipboard history application… the actions I merely maintain for those that uses them. Thus the features I have implemented so far has centered on the history: Expanding the history (really making the history scalable), support for images (this was sort of a test, I want to support abitrary mime types in history) and search-as-you type support.”

Now that we know where Klipper came from and where it might be going…let’s take a look at where Klipper can go by making it work for you. By clicking your mouse on Klipper or pressing CNTRL-ALT-V, you can access the menu which shows the text currently stored. When this menu pops open, you can search through it simply by typing your query. Klipper hunts the text down that you’re typing. Easy enough to find text…but where we are concerned with for this article is ‘configure klipper’,which is where you can access the menu where customization is king. Let’s see what we can do. Start by opening up the ‘Configure Klipper’ menu.

You’re greeted by a three-tabbed layout that seems easy enough to navigate. Tab 1 is “General” and is where all of your general settings are stored (go figure) such as pop-ups for Klipper and Clipboard size. Tab 2 is “Actions” and is where all of the application actions are stored (we’ll explain these later). Tab 3 is “Shortcuts” and has to deal with Clipboard shortcuts while you are in various applications. We’ll cover shortcuts later as well. For now, let’s take things one step at a time and access Tab 1. If it isn’t selected, select it now by left-clicking your mouse on the tab labeled “General.” You should see the image displayed at the beginning of this paragraph.

The General Tab

The tab marked general contains your most commonly used settings. Klipper allows cut and past of text with Control X and Control V respectively…just like the other operating system does. However, unlike that other operating system, Klipper has two buffers for storing text. One buffer is the “selection” buffer. This buffer allows Klipper to store text when you use your mouse to highlight it. You wouldn’t even need to hit Control C to copy it or Control X to cut it…it would already be present in the “selection” buffer. Now, this isn’t always right for everyone so you can choose to Synchronize the “selection” buffer with the “clipboard” buffer…that is, the other buffer that Klipper saves things to. This buffer can be thought of as the normal clipboard buffer where text is cut and pasted from and to. The settings that control both of these buffers is located in the middle of the “general” tab under “Clipboard/Selection Behavior.” Selecting “Separate clipboard and selection” will cause your clipboard to be completely separate from your selection buffer. Selecting “Synchronize contents…” will synchronize things so that you can highlight text to copy it.

Another often forgotten function of this “selection” buffer, is the abiltiy to use the middle mouse button to paste. Of course, this is only if your middle mouse button works in Linux…and if it doesn’t, please visit the forum and we’ll get you up and running.

Cycling through the settings, we can see as the first setting “Pop-up menu at mouse cursor.” Toggling this on or off will allow the Klipper pop-up menus to happen either in your KDE Panel or at your mouse position. Next up is “save on exit.” This setting is used to access text that you saved in a previous KDE session in Klipper. The next setting is “Remove whitespace.” I love this setting because it removes extra spaces from the text you select/cut/paste. This is handy for cutting and pasting urls and downloads. The “Replay actions” setting will cause the actions for the text that is present in Klipper to display in a pop-up. We go into further detail on this later.

“Prevent and empty clipboard” does exactly what it sounds like it does so we won’t explain that one. Moving further down, “Ignore Selection” means that when you highlight text, Klipper won’t save it in its selection buffer (which we discussed earlier). So really, “Ignore Selection” is a switch to turn off your selection buffer. The two settings after this were discussed in the previous paragraph so we’ll skip them now. The timeout action for pop-ups sets the time that pop-ups will remain visible to you. The last setting is very simply a way to set how many clipboard entries/items are stored in Klipper.

Actions Tab

If you dabble in programming, the actions tab is for you. Actions are based on the Qt 4.0 regexp class which provides a way to dynamically use text. It is important to note that Klipper does not support the wildcard options in the class noted above. So what can this action tab do? Well, you can setup actions to take place on the text in the clipboard. For instance, in the picture at the beginning of this paragraph, you can see the setting “^V.+\.jpg$”. This setting contains one action beneath it…which is “Kview %s”. The “%s” is an alias that stands for the most recent text selection you have on your clipboard. So…if we were to select text that ended in somename.jpg, Klipper would launch Kview to view this picture since the actions denote that it should. You can add other applications in here if you know what name or expression they use to execute. For more advanced use of this function, see the class link above or try the Klipper Handbook Actions Entry.

One good action I came up with was adding Firefox to my URL action in Klipper. This way, when I selected a URL, the pop-up window asked me if I’d like to open it in Firefox. Of course, I chose yes. This is a very simple example…I hope other people have more they might be able to provide to supplement this article with.

The actions menu can really be a powerful area of customization. However, having not used Klipper as much as I should be and only really getting into using it for the last few weeks…I’m not too experienced in tapping into these settings. If anyone has any suggestions as to actions that work for them or suggestions as to what actions and expressions in this menu might provide a better KDE experience, please comment below.

Shortcuts Tab

The shortcuts tab allows you to change the Keyboard shortcuts that are used to access Klipper. Switch them to whatever shortcut you want. Don’t like Control V for paste? Change it! You can even assign an action a shortcut key combination. Klipper leaves it up to you to decide how you want things…it doesn’t decide for you. To change a shortcut, select “Custom” and make your changes. To return to the normal setting, choose “Default.” You can also blank out your setting by choosing “None”.

As you can see, Klipper makes life much easier in Linux that it ever could be without it. The meat and potatoes of Klipper is the action menu and I wish I had more to give everyone to show them how powerful Klipper could be. I did do some poking around on the net to see if I could find a listing of actions or even a few handy ones but I came up pretty much empty. It seems no one has collected Klipper actions. So, here is as good as any place to collect actions right? If you have an action that you find handy, please post it in the comments below. If it checks out and works great, I’ll post it in this article and give you reference for it. Thanks for reading!

Make Klipper Work FOR you originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on November 17, 2005.

Not to mention I’ve worked 50+ hours in the past two weeks on big projects. So, now that I have time to breath this weekend…I’ll look to finally getting into the Kswing of things. I hope to cover something I find handy like Kid3, KCheckGmail, and KLinkStatus along side of something that comes installed by default like Klipper (something that most of us see but never use even though it is a powerful little tool). So look for something to pop up this weekend and once again, sorry to those of you who were waiting for me to get my rear end in gear and publish something.

UPDATE: I’ve had some last minute contact with developers and am trying to incorporate this into the article. Please look for this to publish Wednesday or Thursday. I’ve selected Klipper as the KWhat? application we’ll be looking at.

Updates on Kapps originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on November 11, 2005.

What is all this K stuff? That’s often the question when people that have never used Linux and KDE ask when logging in to the environment for the first time. The K naming convention is often portrayed as confusing and cheesy, lacking professionalism. Despite these sentiments and harsh feelings, KDE still flexes its muscle as the desktop of choice for most Linux users. For those of you who have just gotten your start in Linux and perhaps for some of you that just haven’t had the time to investigate application Kxxx in KDE, Yet Another Linux Blog seeks to Ktantalize your KDE Ktastebuds and Ksupplement your Knowledge.

This week’s application is one that is often the first that shows itself when KDE initializes at login. A pop up window greets you with a bunch of adjustable sliders…that’s right, it’s Kmix.

NOTE: You can open up Kmix differently in each distribution. It is usually easy to find and is named ‘Sound Mixer’ or ‘Kmix’ by most distributions of Linux. In Kubuntu, it is located under the ‘Multimedia’ section of the Kmenu.

What is Kmix?

Kmix is pretty much what it sounds like. K for KDE and Mix for Mixer. Kmix is the default sound mixing program for KDE. It allows you to control your soundcard. It is used and supported by ALSA (The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) driver, HP-UX, Solaris, Irix, and all BSD varieties of operating systems. So Kmix allows you to control the volumes, panning(moving sound to the right or left), and which sound card you’d like to have enabled. Y

Multiple Sound Cards? What For?

Many people have the need for two sound cards. For instance, they may want to save music or sound effects at a higher quality and one of their soundcards will do this. Kmix provides a quick and easy way to shift back and forth between the cards and allows access to settings for each. You can select sound cards by toggling the pull down menu under “Current Mixer”.

What are the Settings For?

You can access the settings for Kmix by pulling down the “settings” menu. After that, select “configure Kmix” and a window similar to this will popup:

As you can see, it’s a no brainer thus far to operate…but what do these settings actually tell us? Let’s go through some of the more common settings. We’ll start by explaining all those in the image to the left and then we’ll branch out into some that might be present for only certain types of soundcards.

1. Dock to Panel - Very handy. This allows you to dock Kmix to the System Tray when using the close button
2. Enable System tray volume control - Does exactly what it sounds like it does…it allows control of the volume when Kmix has been minimized to the system tray by the previous setting.
3. Show Tickmarks – this setting displays hash marks on your slider for volume control and panning.
4. Show Labels – This setting displays labels for each sound device when enabled.
5. Restore Volumes on Login - This also does what it sounds like it does…your volumes remain constant through logoff and login. Very handy as well.
6. Orientation – supposedly a setting for the applet to go horizontal or vertical but I’m not sure if this feature is enabled yet. Some mailing list traffic suggests that it hasn’t been enabled yet in KDE 3.4.2. If anyone has corrections to this, please post them in the forum and I’ll correct it and give you a nod here.

What About the Lights?

For the longest time, I didn’t know whether to toggle the LED lights above the volume control to illuminated or deluminated for them to be on. Further investigation told me that when the little green light was on, the sound worked. When the light was off, I enjoyed the silence. There are three colors that Kmix deals you…red, yellow, and green. Green deals with playback sound. Red deals with recording sound. Finally, yellow deals with super secret special soundcard functions…which I don’t have

What do the Tabs Do?

Kmix has three standard tabs. The first is Output. This is the output of your soundcard. You can adjust volumes to your speakers, your headset, or even control surround sound and 3d capabilities. Navigating to the next tab is Input. This tab deals with all things you might record such as a MIC or MIDI sequence. The last tab is Switches. This controls switches for toggling on or off such as bass boost, Mic 1 or Mic 2, and other things.

What’s the slider on the bottom?

The slider on the bottom is for panning your volume to your left speaker or your right speaker. Very simple to operate. The name of your soundcard is displayed in the bottom right hand corner of Kmix. If you notice, mine is integrated sound on my nforce2 Motherboard in my Shuttle X I use as my main PC.

So is that it? I mean, C’mon!

Nope…we’re getting just the basics out of the way. Please remember the different colors of LEDs listed above…they’re imperative to know so that you can tell whether something is muted or unmuted…on or off. Now we begin to get into the good stuff. Hover your mouse pointer over the top of a volume slider and right click (see picture). In this menu you can split channels (show two sliders instead of one), mute, hide, configure shortcuts (keyboard shortcuts), and channels which gives you a dialog box to confirm what you want on/off.

There’s still more of course. Now we get into the applet function. KDE has the ability to run applets, or small programs that run themselves, in its Kpanel. Right click on your KPanel and choose Add to Panel >> Applet >> Sound Mixer. Notice that Kmix now pops up into your Kpanel. You can hover your mousewheel over the top of each volume and raise or lower individual channels. Notice also that the right click menu we spoke of in the previous paragraph also works for the applet. When you’re tired of having it in your menu, right click and choose Remove from Panel >> Applet >> Sound Mixer and it vanishes back again.

Are there even more advanced features?

You bet. However, they’re a bit above my head as I rarely use more than one sound card. The only complicated sound thing I can do is use two sound cards and one set of speakers. For those of you that want to try more complicated features of Kmix, see here.

Ok, now are we done?

Yes. Finally, we’ve covered just about every single function of Kmix. If you have questions or comments, please refer them to the forum since it will provide a better atmosphere for user help (and it will knock some of the cobwebs out of there as well ). Hopefully you have a better grasp of what Kmix is, what it does, and what it is capable of. Thanks for reading and keep posted for next weeks tid bit on more Kapplications.

Please note that the forum has been dissolved and is no longer in service. You may comment below and I’ll still respond

Get in the mix, the Kmix… originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on October 14, 2005.

My first Linux experiences came through Knoppix and Mandrake, which send you to the KDE desktop by default. I used KDE at first, but I wanted to experiment with other less Windowsesque environments. The first one I installed was Enlightenment 16, which I must confess I had first heard of in Neal Stephenson’s essay “In The Beginning There Was the Command Line.” In that essay he said Enlightenment “may be the hippest single technology product I have ever seen” and that “it looks amazingly cool.” Since these sentiments were written in 1999, plenty of rivals have emerged for the title of “hippest tech.”

Once I had Enlightenment installed on my laptop there was no going back. I tried out a few other window managers, but the efficiency of E16 was hard to beat. My only complaints were that Enlightenment seemed a bit short on conveniences such as launchers, so I ended up running GNOME stripped down to one panel and the main menu with E16 as the window manager. Meanwhile, I read the descriptions of the new “desktop shell” that the Enlightenment crew was working on, dubbed Enlightenment DR17 (or E17, as I’ll refer to it from here on) and thought it sounded like exactly what I wanted.

I should mention that “window manager” isn’t quite the right term for E17. The developers call it a desktop shell, intending it to fill in the space between a simple window manager like the original Enlightenment and a full-featured desktop environment like GNOME. In other words, they were setting out to create a desktop not unlike my own E16/GNOME hybrid. In this respect it does not disappoint.

In creating E17 the Enlightenment crew have created a set of shared libraries (the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) with the goal of building a complete set of applications to create an integrated environment where all files and programs are readily available that remains fast and non-resource-intensive. Essentially, E17 breaks down a desktop environment into its essential components (window manager, file manager, launcher, main menu, etc.) and offers them as a completely customizable package, where the user chooses which elements to use at any time.

Early Impressions

When I started using E17 back in early May, I had already been a regular user of E16 for a while. My first impressions were that E17 sported some neat features, but configuring the menus (by making all those damn eapp files, E17′s special icon format — read on for more details) was a hassle, plus E17 was missing many of the small features, such as edge-flipping or icon boxes, that I liked in E16. But I stuck

run command

with it, updating it on a regular basis and reading the continually updated user guide at Get-E.org, and usability has steadily increased. Also, a number of the features I had been missing were added (like

window list

edge-flipping) or had been there all along (turns out there is an icon box module called ibox, which is disabled by default). A graphical eap creator and other additions like a run command, alt-tab window switching (complete with a well designed display) and, for those who use sloppy or mouse focus, automatic placement of the cursor in the newly selected window have improved general usability.

Peeves

One functional feature of E16 I still miss is using middle-clicks to shade windows. I made an attempt at setting this mouse binding in E17, though what happened was middle-clicking anywhere in the window (as opposed to directly on the titlebar) would shade it, which is problematic when, say, browsing in Firefox and trying to open links in new tabs by middle clicking.

Naturally I wasn’t expecting everything to work perfectly — even the splash screen advises “This is development code — be warned!” But to paraphrase someone from another forum, E17 is more stable than your average development window manager.

One early issue I had was Firefox behaving strangely with sloppy focus, the default setting. The titlebar would flash in time with my typing, I would lose all of my Firefox-specific keyboard shortcuts, and there would be no auto completion in the URL bar. Perhaps one of the many “minor bugfixes” one reads about in CVS logs took care of it. Another recently remedied problem was the inability to open menus in applications run under WINE. Another curious effect with WINE programs is that any Windows apps opened with WINE (or CrossOver) have the same window-class, which is how Enlightenment chooses what eap icon it uses to represent the app in the taskbar, pager, and window list. While you can set up different eaps with unique icons for each application (useful for the menu), they will all appear with the same icon in the pager (not so useful). Annoying, though likely not a deal breaker for most users.

Other minor annoyances:

• no easy configuration of module appearance
• click-to-raise only works on titlebar under mouse/sloppy focus, while click-to-focus works anywhere in the window.

Good Things

Evidence in icon view with shelf displayed

I remember someone writing that one of the biggest considerations in your choice of an OS or window manager was answering the question, “Does this help you get your work done?” For a short time last month I switched back to Fluxbox, as I found minor things like focus issues distracting while trying to work. But while writing this review, I’ve found that those minor issues are either fixed or there are workarounds, and E17 has become my standard desktop again. I recently loaded up E16 on the home computer and was struck by how inelegant it is compared to E17.
And so I have stayed with the new Enlightenment. Bugs are fixed, people are creating new themes and icon sets, the user guide at Get-E is becoming ever more detailed, and of course, since this is Linux, there are plenty of opportunities for users to join in and make the damn thing better still.

Installation

As far as installation goes, you can manually configure, compile, and install following the directions at Enlightenment.freedesktop.org, or you can avail yourself of a few less labor intensive options. Packages are available for Debian, rpms for Fedora, and ebuilds (both snapshots and CVS) in portage for Gentoo. More information on installation can be found here. I use both the Fedora rpms and Gentoo ebuilds (from CVS). At the rate E17 is updated, last month’s version is already rustic. I tend to update it every other week. Thus far, I have had no upgrades leave me with an unstable or unusable E17.

The Strange and Wondrous World of the EAP

The only major hurdle facing a new user of E17 is the creation of eap files, which are essentially small files consisting of an icon plus basic information about a program,

The ibar launcher

including its name and executable. In a desktop environment like GNOME, you create launchers on the panel by choosing an icon and entering the program’s name and executable in the launcher

eap editor

Fortunately, it is easily done with an included script or using a guicreation tool. Creating an eap is a similar process, but newly created eaps are stored for Enlightenment to use in the menus, launchers, icon boxes, taskbars, and pagers. Though a few eaps

menu editor

are included in the basic installation, you will want to create more. included in the e_utils package. Ideally, you should only have to build a set of eaps once, plus a number of prebuilt eap collections are available online at www.get-e.org. You then organize menus and launchers by editing text files or using the graphical tool Entangle.

background chooser

Additional configuration is done with the main menu , the background chooser Emblem or the command line tool enlightenment_remote, which is by far the most powerful of the configuration tools available in E17. With it you can set backgrounds, themes, focus policy, virtual desktops, modules, mouse button bindings, key bindings, fonts, menu display speeds, edge-flipping, and more. Graphical tools for key bindings, background creation, and general configuration are all on the TODO list, along with items like desktop icons, tabbed windows, and other monitor modules, so there are plenty of opportunities for coders looking to get involved.

Themes and backgrounds also have their own unique file format that allows a file to include multiple images and scripts, which makes some fun effects possible, such as title bar animation during focus changes, light effects in backgrounds and full-screen animations. A number of themes and backgrounds are available at www.get-e.org. Static backgrounds can be generated from any normal image file.

The following is a short flash video demonstrating a few of the animated backgrounds available, as well as one of the desktop switching animations.
(Go Watch the Background Video!)

The one nasty little surprise that often awaits a user after an upgrade that is your configuration is reset. What this means is that your module, theme, background, and key binding settings are all lost, though these can be easily restored by writing a simple script. Also, as development progresses, E has become better at remembering some settings (menus, weather url, module placement, startup programs, etc.), which makes for less work to restore your desktop. Eap files, menus, and launcher configurations are not affected by updates.

Modules

A central feature of the E17 desktop is the collection of modules which can be added or removed as the user wishes, allowing Enlightenment to be as light or heavy as one desires. Currently there are 16 official modules available, ranging from the useful (pager, launch bar) to the informative (cpu/memory monitor, weather) to eye candy (dropshadow, flame, snow). Discovering the modules was a bit of an adventure, as there was no obvious way to list all available choices, only the loaded ones. (By the way, you can find all the available modules – in Gentoo anyway – by looking in /usr/lib/enlightenment/modules/ and /usr/lib/enlightenment/modules_extra/)

The following three flash videos show off the various modules in use:

• Basic modules
• Flame
• Snow

Evidence

icon view

Another new EFL application, though not actually a part of E17, but deserving of

browser view

special mention is Evidence, essentially an graphical file browser, though a bit more flexible than say, Nautilus. It offers a choice of views (icon, browser, or tree), customizable context menus, and a command shell. The context menu includes options for various file types, such as opening image files in Entice (the E17 image viewer) or editing ID3 tags on mp3 files. Also, you can use the shelf (a frame at the bottom of the main window) to store often used files or application launchers. Evidence can also be used to draw the desktop.

tree view

Personally, this is one of my favorite new applications, even though I have yet to

command shell

master half of what it can do. The command shell combined with the icon view gives me what feels like the best of both the terminal (powerful commands like cp and mv) and graphical file managers (excellent visual organization). There are little tricks to be learned (like using the full path of a file name in shell commands — tab completion can be used for this), and occasional bugs (like the vanishing configuration window), but considering that Evidence has become

editing mp3 tags

remarkably more stable and functional in the past month alone, I foresee this become my full time file manager.
You can use Evidence in any window manager. Visit the Evidence home page for more information.

Engage and Other Applications

Possibly the most popular of the new EFL applications, or at least the one asked about most frequently on various forums, Engage is a combination app launch bar, taskbar, and system tray similar to the dock in Mac’s OS X. Engage is available in two different forms: a standalone form which can be used with any window manager or a module form for use with E17. The standalone version is a bit more robust and configurable than the module form, but I have been using Engage in place of the iBar launcher recently without any troubles, and having the system tray available was quite useful in creating the Wink movies for this review.

Entice

A number of other applications are being developed as well. Equate is a simple, themeable calculator, Entice is an excellent image viewer that allows for zooming and slide shows, Elation is a bare-bones media player, and Eclair is a music player with playlist support, similar to XMMS. Though these new EFL apps are worth keeping an eye on as development progresses, Entice is the only one I use on a regular basis.

On the whole, I am very happy with the new Enlightenment. On their homepage (www.enlightenment.org), the Enlightenment team states “We believe your desktop should not be an eyesore. It should be functional AND beautiful.” They are doing well on both fronts.

Misunderstruck

Enlightenment 17 Review originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on August 22, 2005.