Almost LXDE for OpenBSD 6.2

[shep]

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

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.