Fluxbox 1.3 has arrived!

[th!erry]

Great news tonight: http://fluxbox.org/news/

[Kendall]

YAY!!!

[exploder]

Thanks for posting th!erry. This is great news!

[viking777]

I compiled it yesterday on a Crunchbang Linux install (didn't want to kill Mint ). It went pretty smoothly although my usual technique for customising it, copying .fluxbox and .mintfm2 from my original Mint Fluxbox installation, failed miserably this time, so there must be some 'under the hood' changes that make the old config files incompatible. I managed OK by just copying parts of the files over (like the 'keys' file for example). I like minimalist window managers, but on its own this is too minimal even for me! It just demonstrates what great work Kendall and co. do with the basic program. Anyway after much tinkering I have a desktop that looks like this:

Screenshot.png (129.27 KiB) Viewed 1924 times

Which is kind of what I was after.

Ihave got to say though that the changes between the 1.1 and 1.3 versions are, to my untrained eye, virtually invisible, so don't get over excited will you! I guess the good news about it is that Fluxbox is still alive and well. It remains my window manager of choice on all distros that I run.

BTW. I used checkinstall to roll my own .deb file so if anyone is averse to compiling stuff I would happily email it to you just drop me a pm (I don't have any server space so I can't offer a download). It is the 32 bit version and the only dependency that I needed was libx11-dev.

Forgot to say earlier, the only thing that the install didn't do (compile or deb file) was to add the fluxbox session to your session manager so you can choose it on login. In order to do this you have to create a 'fluxbox.desktop' file in the folder /usr/share/xsessions. The content of mine looks like this:

Code: Select all

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Fluxbox Session
Comment=Use this session to run Fluxbox as your desktop environment
Exec=startfluxbox
Icon=
Type=Application

Although if you have an existing fluxbox install you could probably copy the one from there.

[bladethefox]

Yay! Fluxbox is the best!

[viking777]

Fluxbox 1.3 has arrived! A long long long time is over, and we finally decided to make a release.
Added support for bidirectional text, #2801836.
Allow to override 'Focus New Windows' via .fluxbox/apps
New actions:
ActivateTab
ArrangeWindowsVertical
New 'MoveN' and 'ClickN' action support for keys file
New focus model 'StrictMouseFocus'. This will affect focus when closing, moving, lowering windows, changing desktops, etc, whereas the 'MouseFocus' model will only change focus when you move the mouse.
New "background: unset" property for use in overlays.
Allowing relative paths for background images in style files.
Allowing matching screen number in ClientPattern.
Removed rootcommand from init, as fbsetbg is run automatically nowadays.
Removed line style resources from init file.

Above is a quote from fluxbox.org. It lists some/all the new features in flux 1.3. Having been running it for a couple of days now I can find nothing out about any of these so called new features, least of all how to implement them. I must say that a large proportion of them I don't even understand, what does Activate Tab, Arrange windows vertical and MoveN, clickN actually mean? Does anyone know?

So look in the wiki you say - I have. The discussion groups are closed unless you register with them so they are in effect a big secret, the bug tracker has virtually nothing about 1.3 only 1.1, the feature request and patch tracker do not seem to offer much hope of explanation. So then there is google. There must be a video of the new 1.3 features I thought. Well if there is I can't find it, I found one video that mentioned the release and that was all. In the package documentation, the changelog file can't be read (at least not by my computer), the News file says basically what is at the beginning of this post and the Readme file just tells you how to install it.

I love Flux and I want to love 1.3 even more than previous versions but with the veil of mystery and secrecy that surrounds it at the moment that is pretty difficult.

[th!erry]

Hello,

Unless you really know what you're doing, I just want to make clear that I do not recommend anyone to install the new version on a working Linux Mint Fluxbox system. Kendall is doing a great job here.

An important bug fix in 1.3 (at least for me) is this one: Fixed issues with round corners on restart, #2110455

Just make a test and change something in your menu file. On reopening the menu the rounded corners were broken. Not anymore and this makes it possible to have "dynamic" content in the Fluxbox menu (for example with scripts and cron) without breaking anything.

About the new actions you can try them with something like this in your keys file:

Mod4 h :ArrangeWindows
Mod4 v :ArrangeWindowsVertical (this is new. These actions arrange the windows a little bit like in Xmonad using the whole display)

For stylers I came across something very interesting also: window.handleWidth: -1 (yes minus one. I love it!)

Cheers

[viking777]

Thanks for the reply th!erry.

Please don't worry about my playing around with 1.3, I have 4 Linux distros and 8 disk images of them so I am pretty well bomb proof in that respect. I also echo your comments about the work Kendall does.

The info about the 'Arrange Windows' option was just the sort of thing I was looking for. My first reaction was "Why put an new feature into a release and not enable it by default?" I got my answer soon after I tried it for myself It would be an excellent feature if it worked properly but sadly, for me at least it doesn't. Its main problem for me is twofold. Firstly it considers 'Conky' to be a window and arranges that along with all the other windows you have open - not a good effect believe me. Secondly I also have two monitors and it arranges the windows across both instead of on the default screen as I would want.

Still early days yet and I am not complaining, in all other respects 1.3 seems perfectly usable. I can't change the font in the clock but that is not too big a deal (I know how to change it BTW it just doens't work).

If you find out any more about 1.3 or better still find out where I can find out for myself about it then please let me know.

[th!erry]

Trying the ArrangeWindowsVertical action also resulted in a shock here. But I can imagine it can be handy on netbooks...

[leodelacruz]

deb package for mint fluxbox

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2KYNKISK

In mi desktop ==> http://www.imgcrave.com/u/fluxbox130.jpg

[th!erry]

Your desktop rocks (you made me discover moc BTW thanks a lot) !

Fluxbox 1.3.1 is here with bug fixes: http://fluxbox.org/news/

And just wondering what is the difference between Leo's package and the official one (again this is "experimental"):

https://launchpad.net/~paultag/+archive/fluxbox

[jeffreyC]

Fluxbox 1.3.1 is in Debian Sid repo now so maybe in testing soon

[viking777]

Fluxbox 1.3.1 is in Debian Sid repo now so maybe in testing soon

It is there today (Mar 10th).

Code: Select all

apt-cache policy fluxbox
fluxbox:
  Installed: 1.3.1~dfsg1-1
  Candidate: 1.3.1~dfsg1-1
  Version table:
 *** 1.3.1~dfsg1-1 0
        500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[jeffreyC]

Yes it is
I came to this thread to post about it and found that you beat me to it
Oh well, at least i have a new toy