Howto use GNOME + OpenBox

[zoe washburne]

I like running Gloria with GNOME + OpenBox. Without all the Compiz and Metacity cruft I have been able to run Mint 7 reasonably on an old HP Celeron 1.2ghz + 256mb. And the best part? You get to keep all those nice little touches in Nautilus and GNOME (unlike straight OpenBox...) So now I will take you through the steps to install, test, and finally change to GNOME + OpenBox.

First up we need to install the packages openbox and obconf either do that throug Synaptic or

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sudo apt-get install openbox obconf

Now after that happens pull up (or reuse) the terminal and run

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openbox --replace

DO NOT close this terminal, if you do it will close you window managment, and you will have nude windows you can't do anything with. if you do close it, bring up another terminal and run openbox --replace again.

Thats it! By now you have OpenBox managing your windows and being blazingly fast. I like to tweak obconf thusly.
Open a new terminal (don't close that first one!!!)

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obconf

Now I like to have mine set up with surreal as the theme, with active window fonts set to 10pts and I disable the animations too.

So now you can test GNOME + OpenBox, see if you like it, if you don't, you can always log out and log back in to restore Compiz/Metacity. You can always run openbox --replace if you decide to test it again in the future.

Thats all well and good, Zoe, but how do I change to GNOME + OpenBox from GDM? It won't let me!

There is a known bug that means you can't set GNOME + OpenBox from GDM... The good news is there is a fairly straight forward fix for that https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/272418

I had to comment out the default line and replace it with the following in
/usr/bin/openbox-gnome-session

#exec gnome-session --choose-session=openbox-session "$@"
exec gnome-session "$@"

To edit this file...

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sudo gedit /usr/bin/openbox-gnome-session

All done! Now you can select GNOME + OpenBox when you want speed or regular GNOME if you are happy with the bloat

[XeroXer]

Great howto,
but I ran into a bit of a snag.

Editing /usr/bin/openbox-gnome-session to have the lines you wrote did not work for me, the default still was compiz no matter what I selected at login.
I solved it this way:
$ gconf-editor
/desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager
Change the value from compiz to openbox.

This worked for me but now it works for every session, even if I pick GNOME only.
This is great for me since I don't plan on getting back to compiz, but some of you might. Then you have the possibility to change it back to compiz.

[mfdemicco]

Is this Howto a little outdated? I installed openbox and was able to run an Gnome/Openbox session from the login screen.