Back to Openbox

Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

I wrangled with a framebuffer system on my fastest machine for a few days, even going so far as to customize a PKGBUILD for mplayer that uses only framebuffer output, and relies on no dependencies aside from expat.

To be honest though, a framebuffer system on a faster machine is only partly interesting to me. I need it for my Thinkpad because the driver isn’t working, and I use it for my other Thinkpad because the screen is damaged and because that driver doesn’t work either. 🙄

But the video card in this Inspiron has more than enough muscle to run Compiz (or whatever it’s called these days), so a framebuffer-only system seems like … underkill.

So I reinstalled Openbox on Saturday night. The results are what you might expect.

In an effort to cross all boundaries I installed xcompmgr too, and coupled some of the finest in terminal applications with some fundamental eye candy. That should keep just about anybody happy. 😆

I do see a small niche filled by running an oversized terminal like that with dvtm in it. There are enough high-quality console-based applications available to warrant a “palette” of three or four, running as a desktop window.

Of course, after a bit, the space and arrangement and convenience become a bit … overweening. After all, a tabbed terminal emulator running a tiling window manager which can run inside itself, filled with applications (some of them tabbed too) all on a graphical desktop. … You’d need to have your brain plugged directly into the Internet to need that much “space” at a time.

On the other hand, I’ve known some office techies who might find that useful. One tab per “node” and a clean arrangement of network and process monitors would help to keep an eye on their ducklings. It’s a little too much for me on my lowly home network, but I’m sure others could find it helpful. 🙂