Fluxbox is IMO the perfect window manager for the eee - it's very lightweight, small, takes up little screen real-estate, but most of all, it supports tabs. With the small screen having tabbed console windows is something I couldn't do without - but terminal apps such as Konsole and gnome-terminal are far too heavy duty for the eee.

Fluxbox is in the main Debian Etch distribution from which Xandros is derived, so you can add the Xandros etch repositories to fetch it from. Add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://xnv4.xandros.com/xs2.0/upkg-srv2 etch main contrib non-free

Once you've done this, run sudo apt-get update then run sudo apt-get install fluxbox Fluxbox will be downloaded and installed. Warnings may appear about authentication, but these are not errors.

Take a backup of your /usr/bin/startsimple.sh script and replace it with this:

#!/bin/sh
sudo /usr/bin/sessreg -d -l :0.0 -u /var/run/utmp user
xhost + si:localuser:root # Allow local user root only to access the diplay
sudo /usr/bin/sessreg -a -l :0.0 -u /var/run/utmp user
(sleep 8; /opt/xandros/bin/start_netserv) &
(sleep 16; /usr/local/bin/asusosd) &
sudo rm /tmp/nologin
[ -f /usr/bin/dispwatch ] && /usr/bin/dispwatch &
exec fluxbox

All the kde and IceWM stuff has been removed, but we're still starting the netserv daemon to connect to our default networks, and the asusosd to handle the hotkeys.

Reboot your eee and you're in the lovely world of Fluxbox

Now you've got Fluxbox installed you'll probably want to customise it a bit. You can do much from the Configuration menu (right click on the background), but for some things you need to edit the config files directly. At the moment you're just using the system-wide configs.

Launch a terminal and create the .fluxbox directory. Copy everything from /etc/X11/fluxbox and you'll have a pretty good set of defaults. I've also added the following:

~/.fluxbox/apps

[startup] {powermonitor}
[startup] {minimixer}
[startup] {networkmonitor ath0 eth0}
[startup] {wapmonitor}
[group] (workspace)
  [app] (.*[tT]erm)
[end]

This starts the powermonitor, mixer, networkmonitor and wapmonitor apps on startup. The key difference between networkmonitor and wapmonitor is that wapmonitor instantly shows you the visible Access Points (with the option to refresh). The [group] and [app] lines make all terminals (either xterm or uxterm) tabbed together to save on screen space.

To add your own apps on startup, simply add them to this file enclosed in {} and prefixed by [startup], for example:

[startup] {fbsetbg -r ~/.fluxbox/background/}

fbsetbg -r ~/.fluxbox/background/ - this command sets a random wallpaper from the given directory.

I also added the following line to ~/.fluxbox/keys:

Mod1 Control t :ExecCommand uxterm

This restores the ctrl+alt+t keyboard shortcut for starting a unicode xterm.

Adding

[exec] (Shutdown) {/opt/xandros/bin/shutdown_dialog shutdown} <>

to ~/.fluxbox/menu (just before the final [end]) will add a 'Shutdown' option on the menu.

Fluxbox comes with several default styles that you can check out by right clicking on your desktop, going into the fluxbox config menu and selecting the styles sub-menu. Some of the styles are ok, but there are more available on the web that you you may like.

A good place to check out and download styles is Freshmeat.net FluxBox Themes

Once you find a style you like download the file and make sure that you can extract it correctly. Some files are extracted without an overall directory and if you extract it into a directory with a lot of other files then you may have a problem.

In order to see what will happen when you extract a tar file run the following:

tar tzvf filename

Once you are satisfied that the style files will be extracted correctly then you should actually extract them:

tar xzvf filename

Now you have a choice. If you are the only one using your eee then go into your /home/user/.fluxbox/ directory and create a directory called styles and move the extracted style there.

cd ~/.fluxbox/
mkdir styles
mv ~/style ~/.fluxbox/styles/

Otherwise you can move the extracted style into your /usr/share/fluxbox/styles directory and the style will be accessible by everyone on the computer.

Once you put a style into either of these directories it should show up in your styles sub-menu when you right click on the desktop. If it doesn't then have fluxbox restart itself and you should see it.

A lot of the styles are built around a specific wallpaper so you may want to create a directory in your .fluxbox called backgrounds, put the wallpaper there and use fbsetbg to set the correct wallpaper. (Make sure you resize the wallpaper to fit the eee.)

mkdir ~/.fluxbox/backgrounds
mv wallpaper ~/.fluxbox/backgrounds
fbsetbg ~/.fluxbox/backgrounds/wallpaper.jpg

If you have several wallpapers you like you can load a random wallpaper every time the eee starts up by using the autostart.sh method described above. (Specifically look at the fbsetbg syntax.)

If for some reason you've decided that Fluxbox isn't for you (can't really see this happening, but just for completeness..) you can simple copy the backup of /usr/bin/startsimple.sh you made earlier back across and reboot.

rio b and you numero rio