Fluxbox on openSUSE 11.3

Are you sick of Gnome? KDE? or XFCE? Do you have a very old machine that you want to run Linux on, but the newer Desktop Environments are just too clunky? Well thanks to Linux, you have a choice of which Desktop Environment or Window Manager you want to use.

I personally use Fluxbox as my Window Manager, and have had a great experience with it on Fedora. So, I decided with the recent release of openSUSE 11.3, I’d give it a shot on the new distribution release.

I first started by installing openSUSE 11.3 onto my personal laptop, and opted for the minimal X install so that my machine wouldn’t be cluttered. After the installation I booted into the default Window Manager, TWM.

Next I added the Window Manager repository so that I’d have access to Fluxbox, and also added the X11:Utilities repository so I’d have access to feh, which is a great image viewer, and is also a application that will allow you to set your background while in various Window Managers.

*** Bonus ***
The Display Manager I use is lxdm, previously it was SLIM but SLIM seems to be pretty much abandoned upstream, so I decided to support the LXDE movement.

You can add the said repositories by doing the following:
sudo zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/windowmanagers/openSUSE_11.3/ openSUSE\ 11.3\ WindowManagers

sudo zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/Utilities/openSUSE_11.3/ openSUSE\ 11.3\ X11\ Utilities

Now, you can install fluxbox, slim and feh using:
sudo zypper in fluxbox feh lxdm

Now you’ll have to configure fluxbox to be your new default Window Manager, and configure LXDM to be your default Display Manager. We can do this using the sysconfig yast2 module, or we can modify the following files in /etc/sysconfig:
windowmanager
displaymanager

You want the following settings in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager:
DISPLAYMANAGER=”lxdm”

And the following setting in /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager:
DEFAULT_WM=”startfluxbox”

Once you’re done, you can reboot (or just log out) and be greeted to a nice new LXDM installation, and log in to your nice new fluxbox installation.