FOX Desktop and some graphical apps

Not everything in the house is console-based, as you might have guessed from some of the screenshots around this site. And I do occasionally tinker with new graphical applications too.

Or even entire desktops, like the little-known ROX desktop from a while back. Before I show you another one like that, here are a few applications that are — and some that aren’t — inter-related.

This is qutim.

qutim looks, for most intents and purposes, to be a straightforward IM client with access to a goodly number of networks. Check the home page for the full list; of course the usefulness of any particular client lies with the networks it can access.

But if you’re after something that doesn’t stain your desktop theme with arbitrary icons and bizarre color schemes, you might like this QT-based one.

I haven’t exactly used it; I don’t IM with my blog address, but as you can see, it hooked up nicely to Jabber with my GMail account. Beyond that though, I haven’t really tested it. Give it a spin and see if it suits you.

Another independent project, and an image viewer this time: Viewnior.

I think I found Viewnior in the latest Slitaz, if I remember right. Considering that’s been out for quite a while, I’ve been sitting on this one for too long without mentioning it.

Nice and light (it wouldn’t be in Slitaz if it wasn’t 😐 ), speedy and clean, not too many flashy parts and a clean focus on image viewing. I sometimes still mispronounce it as if it was a film genre though — view-noir. 🙄

Moving on from that poor attempt at a joke, here’s barpanel.

barpanel reminds me slightly of my early days with fbpanel. I have a feeling it’s about as challenging to manage, since the only config I could find was an XML file.

But if you’re an Openbox fan, or just have no fear of the keyboard, that shouldn’t stop you. I adjusted the one in the photo slightly to fit the desktop better, but didn’t go beyond that.

If you want a lightweight panel to take over from some other, heavier applications, that might do the trick for you.

The next three are interlaced, and form the desktop I hinted at earlier. Take a peek at fxdesktop.

Most people know the Fox toolkit from Xfe, which is a great little file manager and something I use daily in my phony Windows XP Classic setups.

You get a lot more than just that when you install the Fox subsystem though. In that photo alone you can see a panel, a calculator, an editor and a control panel, and that wasn’t all that was available.

(Getting it started might be a tiny bit tricky: Try installing Openbox as well, starting the X environment with exec openbox in your .xinitrc file, then opening a terminal and entering export FOX_DESKTOP_WM="openbox" and then entering fxdesktop. That’s what did it for me.)

To highlight one or two, here’s adie, the editor, running solo as a downloaded binary from the Fox website.

It’s reminiscent of Beaver to me, but it’s obvious that this does quite a bit more and is meant to handle heavier coding chores. Likewise, here’s Shutterbug, a screen capture tool, performing independently of fxdesktop but included when Xfe was installed (I think … 🙄 ).

No, the bug doesn’t show up in your captured images, and actually it’s a nice touch since you can push that around the screen to wherever is convenient, and snap screenshots with a single click.

There’s more there and it all runs very light and relatively speedy. Any one of these things alone might be worthwhile on an underpowered, decade-old machine that doesn’t deserve retirement.

And you don’t have to feel trapped and powerless at the command line to use them. 🙄 As if that were even the case. … 😈