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Openbox rather than graphical environment.

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 4:37 pm
by peasthope

I've made the bionicpup32-8.9-uefi.iso CD and applied it to the Sony Mebius. About 2.5 minutes from power up there is a nice graphical environment with many nice tools. No difficulties. Thanks.

Now suppose that X and openbox will suffice for my needs. From there I start termit or similar and start an application from a command line. No doubt that can be achieved by a custom built puppy. Is there a simple alternative with what I have? Start openbox rather than the graphical environment?

Thanks, ... Peter E.


Re: Openbox rather than graphical environment.

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 6:43 pm
by rockedge

Hello @peasthope Welcome to the Kennels. :welcome:

Do you mean switch desktop window manager from JWM to openbox? Or start with no Xorg graphics at all and go straight to the command console?


Re: Openbox rather than graphical environment.

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 7:26 pm
by peasthope

> Do you mean switch desktop window manager from JWM to openbox?

Yes; switch JWM to openbox. Motivated by two factors. (1) No difficulty using commands directly. (2) I expect openbox to set up faster than JWM.

Thx, ... P.


Re: Openbox rather than graphical environment.

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 7:46 pm
by williwaw

@peasthope

just curious why you prefer openbox if you wish to work from a graphical terminal?

from a cd, you will have to remaster with your customizations once you download openbox, or save your changes to a writable medium dvd,usb, hdd etc.


Re: Openbox rather than graphical environment.

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 7:58 pm
by peasthope

> just curious why you prefer openbox if you wish to work from a graphical terminal?

I don't need most of the apps iconized. A bare display with ability to pop a terminal is preferable. Works quite well in Debian. I open firefox, gedit & etc. by commands.

The Sony Mebius requires about 2.5 minutes from power to JWM initialized. Faster is better. =8~) openbox will set up quicker than JWM; correct?

Thx, ... P.


Re: Openbox rather than graphical environment.

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 8:09 pm
by TerryH
peasthope wrote: Thu Feb 03, 2022 7:26 pm

> Do you mean switch desktop window manager from JWM to openbox?

Yes; switch JWM to openbox. Motivated by two factors. (1) No difficulty using commands directly. (2) I expect openbox to set up faster than JWM.

Thx, ... P.

josejp2424 produced an openbox 64 bit pet from 2019, which I couldn't find referenced on this forum. This is a link for the old puppy forum:
https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtop ... 9#p1033699

There are pet packages for fbBox-5.0 32 & 64 bit. They haven't been updated since 2017, but still function OK. These pets contain openbox with FbPanel. I've used it recently, it functions well still. I couldn't find any mention on this forum or the old forum.
Link to download repository:
https://smokey01.com/radky/

Edit: Manually searched through the old forum and found the thread on the old forum for fbBox-5.0:
https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=92982


Re: Openbox rather than graphical environment.

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 9:16 pm
by OscarTalks

Hello Peter E.,
If your main concern is the long boot-up time, I believe the reason for this is that it takes quite a long time to read all the data off the CD via the optical drive and load it into RAM. Puppies a few years ago used to be considerably smaller and booted from CD in a much shorter time. I could be wrong, but I do not think substituting Openbox for JWM will make any difference to that. If you really have a preference for Openbox that is fine. Being a window manager, Openbox is part of a graphical environment anyway. The Puppy standard desktop is ROX-filer (provides the wallpaper and pinboard launcher icons, plus JWM as the window manager, providing tray (panel) and menu. Both of those components (ROX and JWM) are light and fast. You also would want to keep ROX as your file manager, so disabling the pinboard doesn't really make sense. Glad to hear that you were pleased with BionicPup32 for the most part.