Get Rid Of That Bloated Desktop Environment And Install Openbox

so you're ready to move off of those big heavy bloated desktop environments and you're ready to take the plunge you want to start going window manager only but maybe you're not ready to go tiling window manager just yet well you know one of my favorite standalone window managers of all time is a floating window manager called open box so today i thought i would show you guys how to set up open box on linux mint because maybe you're currently on linux mint you're running linux mint cinnamon and you're just not happy with the performance or maybe the function of the cinnamon desktop environment you're looking for something a little more light fast minimal customizable i think you guys will be impressed if you've never taken a look at open box i'm gonna run through installing open box on linux mint here on a virtual machine but you guys can follow along with me on your physical machines you won't do any damage at all to your actual linux mint installation by following along with me because if you don't like open box after we install it you can always just go back and uninstall it it actually won't touch whatever desktop environment you're currently running so if you're running cinnamon or xfce or mate they will still be on the system for you to log into but you'll have this extra session that you can play with in this extra open box session so let me switch to this vm here this is a vm of linux mint cinnamon and i'm gonna pull up a terminal so i suggest you guys do the same and let me see if i can zoom in here and the first thing we want to do of course is do some installations of some software so i'm going to do a sudo apt install and then open box of course for the window manager we also need ob comp we're also going to need something to change our gtk themes so lx appearance is typically the program i use for that with open box we're going to need some kind of panel or dock for me i like using tint 2 for my panel it's all one word tint too i know when i blew up the font it looks like it's two separate words but it's tent and then the number two after that also we're gonna need a compositor because open box does not have compositing built into it so we're gonna need compton or pycom depending on how it's named in the debian slash ubuntu linux mint repositories i think it's still called compton though on arch it would be called pycom and really i could just go with this here because most of the other programs i mean text editors and web browsers and office suites and things like that or all the programs that are already installed in linux mint cinnamon right i just need the window manager open box and some open box specific utilities like ob comp and of course the tent two panel and of course the compositor but one other thing i do want i want a run prompt a run command prompt such as d menu or rophe for purposes of this video i'll install rophi but if you prefer d menu or maybe something else like u launcher or gnome pi or whatever you know all those fancy launchers are but it's nice to have a run launcher on your system so i'm just going to hit enter and go with those programs there and it should just take a few seconds to install these and nothing is too big as far as these programs they were all very small minimal kinds of programs and now that that is installed i'm gonna quit out of that terminal and let's go ahead and log out of linux mint here oh i'm gonna choose log out here and go back to the login manager and if i go to this symbol here i can now change the desktop environment or window manager we're in by default of course we ran cinnamon i also had installed i3 for a previous video i did a while back but here is our new open box session so choose open box and then of course enter your password and log in and by default this is what open box looks like it's a black screen right a black screen it doesn't draw a wallpaper by default we should have installed something to set a wallpaper i didn't think about that we'll fix that all you have by default out of the box with open box if i right click on the desktop you do get this right click menu and i don't know if it's actually populated with stuff we already have it looks like it is this looks like the actual stuff that is installed on linux mint so that's great so on some distributions though this right-click menu will only have just a handful of applications and those applications are hard coded as far as in the menu so you may not actually have those programs installed but this actually looks like our true applications menu because i think we have all of this stuff installed for example if i wanted to go down to utilities let me find a terminal because i need a terminal and maybe it's in the system menu yeah there it is terminal and i am going to make that full screen the first thing i want to do is run a x-rander command here xr and r ma this is just for virtualbox here you guys aren't doing this on physical equipment will not have to do this but i want to pick a better screen resolution here because this resolution when we logged into open box was really small so let's get back to a more standard resolution so this is open box by default it's just the black screen thankfully we do have the right click menu that is populated with some stuff so hopefully you can get a terminal emulator up and running if you need to install software or launch programs if i wanted to right now i could do tint two space and then amper sign and see if our tint two panel runs and it does this is the tint to panel down here at the bottom of the screen now the panel is black by default which matches the black background it's kind of hard to tell there's a panel there until we set a wallpaper and when i close the terminal the tint two panel disappeared but we're going to fix all that here in a second let me go and choose terminal emulator here to open the terminal again and let's see if i can zoom in again here yeah so we need to do another sudo apt install and then we need to install something to draw wallpaper for us i'm going to install this program here called nitrogen and give it just a second and then once we have nitrogen installed what i'm going to do is i'm going to type nitrogen here in the terminal and let's go ahead and launch it i'm going to go into preferences i'm going to add a directory here and the directory i want to add is probably in the root file system and slash user slash share slash backgrounds linux mint so we could actually do either one of those linux mint uh directories there i'll just select one of them and then hit ok and we should have all those linux mint wallpapers that were on our system previewed here inside nitrogen so let's go ahead and pick one so i'll just pick this one here just to have something that's not a black screen now all right that actually worked i did notice it actually didn't size it correctly though if i right click to get back to the terminal emulator and if i launch nitrogen again i'm going to go back and instead of the automatic sizing i'm going to do scaled and then hit apply and now it stretches that wallpaper to actually take the entire 1680 by 1050 resolution of this vm now i'm going to close this terminal and i'm going to actually use some of the graphical applications on the system since i'm doing this video from the point of view you guys are used to your traditional desktop environments and those graphical programs that come installed with them i'm gonna try not to do everything in the terminal and at the command line and i'm gonna try to avoid using tools like vim or anything like that on this video but if i right click on the desktop right now and go into applications let me see if i can find the file manager actually it's under utilities there it is it's called files let me launch that and then what we want to do is if i go into the menu here and i choose view and i click on show hidden files because we need a hidden directory we need a hidden directory in our home directory called dot config go into that directory and just for sake of having more stuff viewed on the screen at a time i'm going to change the default look from icon view to list view so we actually get a list now we need a directory in this dot config folder called open box because that's where your open box config files need to reside on the system there is not an open box folder but if i go into the menu system here to file and then create new folder and then it's going to ask me what to name the folder here i'm going to type open box and now we have dot config slash open box go into the open box folder which will be empty and i'm going to right click and i'm going to create a new document a empty document and i am going to name it auto start now i'm going to right click on the auto start file that we just created and i'm going to choose open with text editor and that should launch this empty document in the text editor that was installed by default on linux mint cinnamon i think it's zid if i go to help and about yet it's zid which is xed it's a old fork of um g edit which is gnome's plain text editor really nice text editor actually now auto start as the name implies are all the programs that are gonna start every time you log into open box so when you first log into your desktop what needs to happen well one of the first things that needs to happen is we need a panel so tent two space ampersand and then hit enter and then what's the next thing we want well we need a compositor for transparency and drop shadowing and nice effects and it also helps prevent screen tearing so our compositor on linux mint of course is going to be compton space ampersane and then hit enter to go to the next line and then we need to draw our wallpaper and again nitrogen was our wallpaper setter so do nitrogen space dash dash restore it's the command to restore the wallpaper that you'd previously set using nitrogen and then of course at the end add the ampersand hit enter and one other thing i'm going to add because i had installed it earlier and this is just so you guys can see how this auto start file works let's launch rofi as soon as we uh launch open box so rophie is going to pop up as soon as we log into open box and the command to get the ropey run launcher is roofy space dash show space run space and then i'll do an amper sign at the end of that as well i'm going to go up here and i'm going to click save the current file and then i'm going to right click on the desktop here and i'm going to choose exit we're going to exit out of open box it's going to ask are you sure you want to exit yes we do and i'm going to type my password and log back in and you see our wallpaper was drawn with nitrogen we have the tint 2 panel which is has some slight transparency and because the transparency is working we know compton is working and then of course rofi also launched as well so our auto start file did everything that we wanted it to do now i need to go back and fix the resolution here again so i'm going to open the terminal i'm going to up arrow on the keyboard until i get to that x render command i ran earlier i'm going to hit enter and the wallpaper is a little funny so i'm going to type nitrogen here in the terminal and to fix the wallpaper i'm just going to pick another wallpaper here and hit apply just to fix the the weirdness that was going on with that wallpaper now one thing i don't like here is this applications menu that's nice that it has all everything installed on the system but it is really tough to navigate this thing because i don't know if you guys have noticed this but it is actually not in alphabetical order when i go to the systems category it's not listed alphabetically so it makes it really tough to find anything you're looking for i guess if you don't know what you're looking for it doesn't matter but most of the time when you're looking through a menu system for an application you know exactly what you're looking for and typically you're going to look for it in alphabetical order and because it's all jumbled up that menu is kind of tough but typically what you want to do when you run open box is you want to install a third-party program called menu maker which automatically generates a menu system for you so i'm going to launch firefox the browser and there is a quick launcher for firefox by default here at the at the bottom of the screen in our tent two panel and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna do a search for linux menu maker and let's see there it is what is menu maker and it's hosted over on sourceforge a menu maker by the way is a menu generation program for x11 window managers and for a lot of them it will create a menu system for open box fluxbox jwm pec wm window maker i think it works with ice wm and a few others to install menu makers it's not in your repository the debian repository or the mint repository so we're gonna have to download the source code and then then do a configure make and make install inside the terminal so i will keep that up so you guys can read what that is but i'm gonna open this in a new window here and i'm gonna choose to save the file and i'm gonna click ok and it downloaded in seconds so it was already through with the download and then copy this these three commands here they're actually all in one command because it's saying hey run configure and then run make and then run make install and now you usually need to be a sudo i have root privileges for the make install so so this command actually may not work for me if i just try to do it as is in the terminal now let me open up our file manager again so i'm going to right click and if i remember correctly it's in under utilities and files let's go into our downloads directory and there is that tar gz file there it's an archive it's a compressed file of menu maker i'm gonna right click on it open with archive manager yes and we're just gonna extract here hit extract one more time and then close and we just extracted that from the archive now what we need to do is in a terminal we need to cd into the menu maker directory and then run that command configure make make install so i'm going to close the file manager we won't need that let's go ahead and open a terminal and then zoom in here what you want to do is cd into the downloads directory so do cd space capital d o w hit tab and it will complete the path for you and then the next thing you want to do is just hit tab again if the only thing in that directory is your menu maker and that's all that's in this is the menu maker directory that we extracted so cd into that and then run dot slash configure well i don't think i've ever seen this error before when i do a configure make make install i did the configure and i got an error checking for gcc for the c compiler checking whether the c compiler works no was the answer and it says error c compiler cannot create executables surely the c compiler is on the system i'm going to run this command here so let's uh just see okay user bin cc i'm going to run echo dollar symbol and then two capital c's uh nothing was returned when i tried to echo that you know what i'm going to just assume there is an issue with gcc here i'm going to just do a pseudo apt install g plus plus and let's go ahead and give it my root password all right i'm gonna clear the screen here and do an ls again remember we are in the menu maker directory and i'm going to run dot slash configure and now configure works all right i'm glad we figured that out now after configure you need to run make and then after that you need to do this with root privileges sudo space make space install and it looks like everything worked correctly if everything worked correctly then we should be able to run the menu maker command and generate our open box menu now let me go back to the browser here and the command to run is maker one word maker and then space the name of your window manager so i'm gonna cd back into the home directory clear the screen so that command is maker space the name of your window manager in my case open box no terminal emulator specified we'll use the default i'm not sure if that's a legit error or just a warning but i have used menu maker enough in the past i think i can specify a terminal with a dash t flag so i could m maker space open box space dash t space x term because x term is like the standard default terminal emulator for x11 systems says terminal emulator couldn't be found try another one because x term is not on the system so just to get this to actually work even though i don't plan on using x term oh it's a fine terminal emulator i'll go ahead and install it just to make sure this menu maker command works correctly here and then i'm going to up arrow back to this command here m maker open box dash t x term and then now we also need to give it the dash f flag for force all right and now if i close all of this and if i right click on the desktop this is of course the previous menu you know nothing has changed what we need to do is in the main screen here reconfigure open box and then when i right click look now we have our new menu that was generated by the menu maker script and it's actually nicely organized by category and everything is alphabetized so it's this is much easier to navigate and of course this can be done anytime you know if when you install new software or remove software from your system you'll have to go back and rerun that maker command to generate a new menu system for the the new programs you installed now that we've got open box set up we have our menu we have our wallpaper drawn we have a taskbar the next thing you want to do is you need to get comfortable with how you configure open box so i'm going to right click on the desktop i'm going to go into the utilities category i'm going to go into files this is our file manager and again go into the dot config folder open box and in the open box directory we have our auto start there really should be three config files auto start for auto starting programs the menu dot xml file this is your menu system so what you see in this right click menu is actually just this big xml file the other thing you need is a rc.xml the rc xml is your configuration as far as setting up key bindings and things like that there's not one well there's not one by default in your dot config slash open box directory but there is one that you can go and get on the system and copy it over into here so i'm going to go into utilities and where is the terminal and maybe it's system where is still trying to figure out where everything is uh there's a shells category terminal all right and let me zoom in again so first we need to find where the default rc.xml is on the system so run this command sudo space find space slash for root we're going to search the entire directory structure basically for dash i name oh so insensitive case searching by name and the name we're searching for is rc.xml and then give it your root password and there it is slash etsy slash xdg slash open box slash rc.xml i'm going to middle click on it to copy it and then go back to the front of this and i'm going to do a cp for copy and i'm going to copy this over to in my case slash home slash dt slash dot config slash open box slash rc.xml copy that over if i go back to the file manager now we have an rc.xml and this is where you could go and play with a lot of settings this is where you can set the font as far as the font face font size you can set up your workspaces how many workspaces you like to use maybe you want two workspaces or four workspaces or whatever you can set all that but really what you want to go in here is and play with are the key bindings there are a lot of default key bindings but maybe you want to change them and this is the file that you would go in and play with that now i won't sit here and hack on these config files on camera that would be long and tedious but i have my own config files already out there so for me it would be very easy to just go and grab my open box config files from git lab if you guys want to check out my open box config files you can go grab them too all you need to do is in the terminal type get space clone space https colon slash slash get lab.com slash dwt1 slash and it's in my dot files repository so dot files dot get get is not installed on linux mint out of the box that's interesting so let's do a sudo apt install get and now that we've installed that let's go and run that git clone again to get my dot files from my git lab maybe it'll take a minute or two because i've got a lot of dot files actually it downloaded those rather quickly it just took a few seconds now if i do an ls here in the terminal you see there is a directory called dot files that is what we just got from my gitlab cd into that well actually let's not cd into it what i want to do is close the terminal because this is probably what some of you guys will do is let's just open up our graphical file manager so i'm going to go to utilities files and look for the dot files directory i'm going to right click on it and i'm going to open it in a new window so there is my dot files directory then in this window i'm going to go into dot config open box and then in my dot files dot config open box and all of this i'm gonna control c to copy go over here control v to paste and it's going to ask me do i really want to replace all these files with those files yes i do and if that worked correctly i could right click on the desktop i could reconfigure and there is my open box config file as far as my settings and everything this is my my custom menu that i hand code i actually don't use menu maker to make my menu system i just do it all in xml now while we're here let's go ahead and grab my config files for rophi and tent2 so i'm going to click on rophi and then with the control key held down i'm going to also click on tint2 and then control c to copy and then over here i'm going to do a control v to paste and yeah we'll just merge everything and replace everything and now once again we'll just reconfigure actually what i'm going to do let's exit in the virtual machine the resolution got a little funny on me here but let's log in and hit escape to get out of that roofie menu and what i'm going to do is i'm going to go in here actually i'm going to click on a terminal and my terminal emulator that i like to use with open box apparently was termite and it says can't find termite because it's not installed on the system so i'm going to right click and instead of the terminal i'm going to click on rofi let's launch rofi and i'm going to search for terminal hit enter and this of course is the system terminal here on linux mint i'm going to run that x render command one more time to fix the screen resolution here and yeah i don't like all of that but really i don't like that wallpaper anyway i'm going to launch rophie one more time which in my config i think i had it set to mod r super r yeah so i can just hit super r and then type terminal and zoom back in what i'm going to do is i'm going to run another git clone i'm going to do get clone space https colon slash slash getlab.com dwt slash wallpapers dot get let's get my wallpapers repository from my git lab because i got better wallpapers than the mint guys all right so we got that wallpaper directory from my gitlab so if i right click and go into my menu system here and i think i have nitrogen under a preferences category and now i'm going to go into the preferences for nitrogen i'm going to take that default linux mint directory and delete it i don't want nitrogen to use that directory for wallpapers anymore instead i'm going to add a new directory for wallpapers and it's going to be in my home directory and it's going to be wallpapers that is what we just get cloned right my wallpapers so there's about 300 wallpapers in that directory so let's select those and hit ok and now nitrogen is going to load 300 wallpapers you know these are all of my wallpapers and i'm just going to pick one that i think is appropriate because i'm doing a dark theme with the tint 2 panel i'm probably going to do a dark open box theme and a dark gtk theme as well let's pick a light wallpaper to go with our dark themes so i'm gonna choose that one right there it's probably gonna be really nice against a dark theme once i have a dark open box theme i don't have one yet so let me get back into the terminal i have a open box theme on my git lab as well so i'm going to up arrow and i'm going to get clone gitlab.com dwt1 slash dt dash dark dash theme dot get and now we've got my dark gtk theme and my dark open box theme they're not going to be activated though until i open the lx appearance tool remember we installed a program called lx appearance and this is it and somewhere in the gtk themes here i should see dt dash dark themes no it won't appear there because it's in my home directory but that's not where it needs to be let me launch rophie again and i'm going to open files and that the name of our file manager the generic name we have dt dark theme here but that needs to be in the root directory at slash user slash share slash themes and we will put it in that directory if you're on a multi-user system so everybody has access to that theme if you just want your user to have access to this theme what you could do is copy it and instead of going to slash user slash share slash themes you could go into your home directory dot local share themes and there's no themes directory let's create one so if you create a themes directory in dot local slash share slash themes and then paste dt dash dark theme and then close and then let's open the lx appearance tool again and now dt dash dark theme is down here let me go ahead and click on it hit apply and nothing happens when i do that it may be a permission problem i think i may have put it in the wrong directory it's not necessarily the wrong directory but i think on ubuntu and ubuntu based systems instead of putting that thing in dot local share themes what i should do is put it in the home directory under dot themes so i'm going to create a folder in the home directory called dot themes and then in dot themes i'm going to paste dt dash dark theme right click and go into lx appearance and now it actually works that's weird it doesn't work in local share themes but it does work in the home directory slash dot themes all right and that is my dt dark theme that's a gtk 2 theme that i've been holding onto for years it's really dark not everybody likes a really really dark theme but i like it now i have an open box theme as well to go with the dark gtk theme because this is the gtk theme what you see inside the window but the border of the window the top bar and of course the right click menu that is actually open box that's part of the open box window manager so we need to look for a program called ob comp for ob config i think i have it in my menu system under administration open box config right there if i click enter this is the ob conf tool and i need to go to appearance actually i need to go to theme and then go down until you see dt dark theme and then you see the title bar is no longer blue it's a dark color and that's all i wanted to do my right click menu of course is now dark as well it's a very black with some green highlighting to match the tint to panel it's colored the exact same way so yes i planned it that way i do notice the fonts are a little weird in lx appearance here i don't know if it's a problem of maybe some fonts in my config that i have set that aren't installed on the system out of the box but that's all i'm going to play with today but this is a little bit of what you can do with open box open box is a really cool program a window manager it's really attractive and it's really light it's really fast it's great on memory as far as ram usage i mean it loads up in like 200 megs of ram or less you know depending on how stripped down you want to get with open box so those of you that are looking for a good alternative from things like gnome and cinnamon again those big heavy desktop environments if you want to go something lighter something far more customizable as well we didn't really customize it to its full extent on this video this was more of an introductory kind of video for setting up open box but open box is extremely customizable you can set key bindings to do anything you want to do with your windows now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of the show michael gabe corbin mitchell devin fran arch 5530 economy channel chuck claudio dillon george devils lewis paul robert scott somebody else willie i i threw some extra names in there and i probably forgot some names in there that time but yeah i want to thank all these guys all these names you're seeing on the screen they're the producers of the show they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon i also want to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen these are all my supporters over on patreon because this channel is supported by you guys the community if you'd like to support my work look for distrotube over on patreon all right guys peace

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 69,306

Keywords: desktop environment, arch linux, open source, free software, window manager ubuntu, window manager tutorial, window manager vs desktop environment, linux, gnu linux, linux mint, linux window managers, top linux window managers, openbox, openbox window manager, openbox tutorial, gnu linux tutorial, linux on chromebook, linux commands, openbox linux

Id: T-rQ7iV0agY

Length: 32min 49sec (1969 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/WonderHollow]

I'd recommend qtile for those who know Python, it can be run inside gnome which may facilitate the transition for gnome users.