Fluxbox
Ubuntu Fluxbox Howto
(This page is very much under construction)
What is Fluxbox?
[http://www.fluxbox.org Fluxbox] is a lightweight and responsive window manager for GNU/Linux. It is not as elaborate as GNOME or KDE, but it uses considerably fewer system resources. This makes it uniquely suited for situations where system resources, especially RAM, are very limited.
Fluxbox is rather minimalistic in its default configuration. Fortunately, it is easily customized and reconfigured by editing text files.
Why use Fluxbox?
As mentioned above, Fluxbox runs very happily on very few system resources. As such, it is ideal for use on older hardware. (For this reason, it is the default window-manager of the very aptly named [http://www.damnsmalllinux.org DamnSmallLinux] distribution). Moreover, it is fast and clean, and makes for a very efficient working environment.
STEP ONE: Installing Fluxbox
N.B.: Although the following assumes you already have Ubuntu installed, and are working from within GNOME, the steps shown are for installing Fluxbox using apt from the command line.
This is the easy part. Fluxbox is in the universe repositories. Enable the universe repositories, either in Synaptic or by uncommenting them in your /etc/apt/sources.list file, open a terminal, and execute
$ sudo apt-get install fluxbox
Restarting the Xsession with CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE would bring up GDM, and Fluxbox would then appear on the sessions menu. However, I would NOT restart the Xsession at this point.
Why not? For some reason, the Fluxbox packages in Ubuntu's universe repositories create non-standard (at least for Fluxbox) xsession files, which means the ~/.fluxbox/startup configuration file is not automatically generated the first time Fluxbox runs.
(For a more complete discussion of what the ~/.fluxbox/startup file does, please see [http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Fluxbox#Startup_Applications This page in the Gentoo Wiki])
Before we run Fluxbox, we must correct this oversight.
In a terminal, execute
sudo nano /usr/share/xsessions/fluxbox.desktop
When you see the following text:
exec=fluxbox
replace that line with
exec=startfluxbox
Once you have finished editing /usr/share/xsessions/fluxbox.desktop , restart the X server and log into fluxbox.
(To do, still: customization, a more complete discussion of ~/.fluxbox/startup, usage how-to, using feh and setting backgrounds, editing menus.)