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Old 15th October 2017
shep shep is offline
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Default Almost LXDE for OpenBSD 6.2

This is a spin-off of the instructions and scripts of SimpleDE which has an OS/X type interface. I initially was looking at an LXDE type desktop in OpenBSD but found lxpanel to be linux centric (pulseaudio/alsa) and beyond my capabilities to port to OpenBSD. x11/wbar was an alternative application launcher that I adopted and is now part of my work flow.

x11/tint2 has been active and has been adding panel features. This howto uses tint 0.14.6.
Using x11/yad and x11/xdotool with tint 0.14.6, one can functionally approximate lxpanel in OpenBSD.

On my Intel Atom 330 (Dual core 1.6 mHz w/ 2 GB DDR2) it idles with 104M memory useage and www/iridium runs well. If you are installing on i386 with less RAM, consider deleting iridium, libreoffice-java/libreoffice and using netsurf/abiword/gnumeric
Edit: netsurf-gtk/netsurf-fb seafaults on 6.2/i386 - consider dillo or a text browser.

The following instructions and scripts will build a lightweight DE that has a similiar interface to LXDE. It does include some gui configuration tools for openbox and tint2. Obmenu is not fully functional and does not support menu icons.

New for 6.2

1) Iridium is the main browser. It is essentially the same 58 version as chromium but disables much of data that Google likes to collect. I did have an issue where Iridium would always prompt to be the default browser. I'm not sure what solved this but the prompt eventually went away (took several tries) with the following:
$ mkdir -p ~/.local/share/applications
$ ln -s ~/.config/mimeapps.list ~/.local/share/applications/
$ cp /usr/local/share/applications/iridium-browser.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

2) For laptop users who have ever tried to find an airport access point quickly, a wifi applet is now availble in the openbox autostart file. Just uncomment it and set your doas.conf file per Wiconn

3) Many LXDE features are implemented via the panel. You can run tint2conf, a gui interface, to configure additional features. The current version of tint2 adds buttons (used to launch the openbox root menu) and has executors to run scripts. There are a number of examples of executors on the tint2 website:
https://gitlab.com/o9000/tint2/blob/...t2.md#executor

If you move the panel from the bottom be aware that you need to reserve a margin in openbox for the new location and remove the bottom margin. This can be done with obconf or by editing ~./config/openbox/rc.xml

4) Changed ~/scripts/weather_map.sh to use imagemagick to play an animated gif of a specified US National Weather radar station.

To start, download the following attachment:

OpenBSD62_AlmostLXDE.tar.gz

If the download is named as a "php" file. Rename the file OpenBSD62_AlmostLXDE.tar.gz

$ mv attachment.php OpenBSD62_AlmostLXDE.tar.gz

Extract with
$ tar xvzf OpenBSD62_AlmostLXDE.tar.gz

Then change into the OpenBSD62_AlmostLXDE directory and open the README with your preferred pager. The README should take you the rest of the way. If you use the default fvwm window manager, one xterm can be used for the README and a second xterm for the commands.

Here is a screenshot of the finished install
Name:  62LXDE_screenshot.jpg
Views: 2728
Size:  28.8 KB

Please reply to this thread for any errors.

If you find this to be of use and a time saver, please consider supporting the OpenBSD project.

20Oct2017 Errata: ~/.xsession starts openbox-session which needs consolekit2. consolekit2 was missing from the pkglist so users were getting the default openbox session.

Last edited by shep; 26th October 2017 at 08:16 PM. Reason: use gpicview in lieu of geeqie Added consolekit2 to pkglist
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Old 15th October 2017
ibara ibara is offline
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I don't mean to deter from the theme of this thread, but can you identify what parts of LXDE still need porting to make this into a Full LXDE OpenBSD desktop? While I do not want to maintain LXDE, I would be happy to help an interested team complete porting it.
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Old 16th October 2017
shep shep is offline
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Freshports LXDE-meta
and
NetBSD LXDE-meta

Some of the components are just configuration gui's ie lxrandr - xrandr. The threads theme was that a lightweight gtk based, desktop could be achieved with alot of manual configuration, openbox, yad, tray-app and tint2.

The challenging port, IMHO, is lxpanel. Although it has a FreeDesktop compliant menu, network monitoring uses linux /proc and the volume control is confined to Alsa/Pulseaudio. Lxpanel itself is a total rewrite of fbpanel.

The big picture is that LXDE is being supplanted by LXQt - there is little to no upstream activity in the original gtk based DE.

LXQt looks promising although I would like to see a Qt based windowmanager Some have used kwin but the reports are that kwin pulls in a number of KDE libs and is not as responive as openbox.

One thing I have been looking at is to autogenerate a Freedesktop compliant openbox menu.

Last edited by shep; 17th October 2017 at 08:00 AM. Reason: their > there
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Old 16th October 2017
ibara ibara is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by shep View Post
LXQt looks promising although I would like to see a Qt based windowmanager
Lumina?
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Old 16th October 2017
shep shep is offline
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I tried x11/lumina around 6.0. At that time it reliably left a fluxbox.core at each login and used about 2x the resources. One of the integrated applications in lumina was for management of the zfs filesystem - great if you're running zfs in FreeBSD, otherwise just useless bloat.

There are a number of qt based lumina applications that have not been ported to OpenBSD:
Freshports lumina search

Last edited by shep; 16th October 2017 at 07:06 PM. Reason: utilities -> applications
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Old 17th October 2017
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Oko Oko is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by shep View Post
I tried x11/lumina around 6.0. At that time it reliably left a fluxbox.core at each login and used about 2x the resources. One of the integrated applications in lumina was for management of the zfs filesystem - great if you're running zfs in FreeBSD, otherwise just useless bloat.

There are a number of qt based lumina applications that have not been ported to OpenBSD:
Freshports lumina search
Well obviously ZFS is dependency for Lumina so you should start by porting ZFS to OpenBSD naturally as a FUSE modul since reimplementing gigantic proprietary Solaris kernel as a part of OpenBSD kernel (as FreeBSD guys did) is a non-starter.
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Old 17th October 2017
ibara ibara is offline
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I think we should keep this to an "Almost LXDE" for OpenBSD desktop thread. If people want to talk about porting Lumina, let's spin that off to another thread. I almost regret bringing it up in my first response to the OP, but I do want to see LXDE fully ported and am happy to help if others want to do the work.
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Old 17th October 2017
shep shep is offline
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Quote:
I do want to see LXDE fully ported and am happy to help if others want to do the work.
LXDE is modular and the following are in place
editors/leafpad
graphics/gpicview
x11/openbox
x11/pcmanfm
x11/lxrandr


LXpanel is the major missing component : audio volume, clock/calendar, network manager, menu and application launchers.

Early in the LXDE project, the desktop used fbpanel. fbpanel was buggy leading to a complete rewrite as LXpanel. Some LXDE users were not that impressed and would tolerate some Xfce4 libs to run xfpanel.

I choose a different route because the tint2 project was active, adding features, bug fixes, bsd support and was written in C. With the tint2 update, tint2 can do everything, and more, that lxpanel does/did..

There was a submission of lxappearance to the ports mailing list a couple of months ago that did not go anywhere.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m...1715617686&w=2

Here is a screen shot with some of the applications and a lighter theme
Name:  screenshot_light.jpg
Views: 2786
Size:  47.4 KB

Last edited by shep; 4th November 2017 at 07:58 PM. Reason: added leafpad
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