LincolnBlogs

At the behest of Dann, the other night I installed the Openbox windowmanager. I have to say I am pretty impressed with it so far. With no icons, task bar, etc., to clutter up your screen it leaves more realestate there for you to fill up with your favorite and more productive things. Not to mention it’s dang fast!

Now there are a couple things I had a problem with (aren’t there always). The first being that although I really could care less about the lack of taskbar, I was at a loss for a clock/calendar. After some trials and surfing around I found the perfect solution for that was Conky. now Conky does a lot more things than show the time, but in my case it fit the bill perfectly. I configured the .conkyrc file to do some transparency and put only the system name and the time/date on the lower left hand corner of the screen. The code for that looks like so:

own_window_hints undecorated,below,skip_taskbar
background yes
double_buffer yes
use_spacer yes
use_xft no
update_interval 30
own_window_transparent yes
alignment bottom_right
gap_x 10
gap_y 10
draw_outline yes
TEXT
$nodename
${time %D %H:%M}


The other part of that was the calendar, but I had forgotten how easy it was for me to just run “cal” in an xterm, so that solved that problem too 😉 The last frustration was a wierd error I was getting using Openbox. After a few minutes of use the ctrl-alt arrow key switching of the desktops would stop working. After some trial and error I found that this behavior only happens when I am running vmware server. I assume it’s due to the way that program handles screen controls. As soon as I turn the vmware server console display off and restart Openbox, the problem goes away. I can probably live with that too, but if anyone knows a better solution, please let me know.

Oh yeah, and if you haven’t yet tried Openbox, you should. It’s rockin’!