Using Openbox as your window-manager in Xfce

I've always preferred to use the best tool for the job such as Xfce and Openbox.
I find Xfce to be the best all round desktop environment and can't fault it at all, but wanted to merge the awesome experience that Openbox gives in regards to a lightweight window manager.

So, how exactly do you use Openbox on Xfce and still use the application finder, whisker menu and other xfce items...here's how.

First, amusing you have both Openbox and Xfce installed, log into your Xfce session. Open "Settings Manager" and go to "Sessions & Startup".

On the "Session" tab there should be an entry named "xfwm4", go ahead and select it and on the bottom right click "Quit Program".

Then you will see everything go a little haywire because we just killed the window manager, that's normal. Now we are going to start the Openbox window manager that is in my opinion, much better because it can be customized via a text editor; ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml in case your wondering.

Open a terminal and enter "openbox --replace & exit", which will load the Openbox window manager. If you restart now, the default Xfce session will load. So, we need to make sure to save the session inside the "Session" tab we should still be in. On the bottom left, click "Save session" and close the settings manager.

Xfce running with Openbox window manager

We can now restart or log out, whichever you prefer.

And as you see, Openbox is now the window manager.

Some key bindings will be doubled up between Xfce and Openbox, so make sure you check your config file and keyboard settings.

Wifi not resuming after suspend

In Lubuntu 15.04 wifi there is a bug that causes the wifi to not re-connect after the suspend state is removed. I've found a simple fix to remedy this situation.

I'm using a Acer laptop with the AR9462 Wireless Network Adapter, but this seems to be a generic fix from what I can see so far.

We need to create a file under /etc/pm/config.d/ and add a instruction to suspend a kernel module. So, fire up your terminal and edit the file.

sudo nano /etc/pm/config.d/config

Then add this line into the new file:

SUSPEND_MODULES="iwlwifi"

I've found this quick fix to work well on suspend resume on Lubuntu 15.04.

Alt tab all windows in Lubuntu

Using alt tab on Lubuntu can be a pain if you are used to all the desktops to be shown. But this is a simple solution, all we need to do is edit the following file (use whichever text editor you prefer)

nano .config/openbox/lubuntu-rc.xml

Firstly, find section <keybind key="A-Tab">
Edit to look like this (added line in red):

   <keybind key="A-Tab">
      <action name="NextWindow">
        <allDesktops>yes</allDesktops>
        <dialog>icons</dialog>
        <finalactions>
          <action name="Focus"/>
          <action name="Raise"/>
          <action name="Unshade"/>
        </finalactions>
      </action>
    </keybind>

Seconly,  find section <keybind key="A-S-Tab">
Edit to look like this (added line in red):

    <keybind key="A-S-Tab">
      <action name="PreviousWindow">
        <allDesktops>yes</allDesktops> 
        <finalactions>
          <action name="Focus"/>
          <action name="Raise"/>
          <action name="Unshade"/>
        </finalactions>
      </action>
    </keybind>

Save, log out, log in. Alt+Tab will now cycle through all windows on all desktops. Shift+Alt+Tab will cycle in reverse.

Install Wordgrinder .60 in Linux

To me the best applications are designed to do one thing and do it well, that's the UNIX philosophy. 

Wordgrinder is definitely an awesome application. It's a word-processor for the terminal full of features that you just wouldn't expect. It has spell-checking, bold fonts, italics and import/export to a range of file formats. It really does stay out of your way and lets you get on with writing. I can highly recommend this great application. 

I'm using version 0.60 and I believe version 0.50 is what's in the Ubuntu repo's at the moment. So, I'm going to show you how to get it up and running, building it is very easy to do.







Firstly, we need to download the source from github

Secondly, extract the source, if you want to do it via the command line the type this command:

unzip wordgrinder-master.zip

Then we need to cd into the directory

cd wordgrinder-master

Before we start the building process, we need to install a few dependencies

sudo apt-get install libncursesw5-dev liblua5.2-dev zlib1g-dev libxft-dev lua5.2 

We then start the install process with this command

make -j

And the final command

sudo make install PREFIX=/usr

We can then start using Wordgrinder in any terminal. I prefer lxterminal, but use whatever you like.

I will be adding more tutorials on customizing the terminal colors and fonts with a shortcut you can place in the menu, so check back soon to find out how.

After upgrading the system, I noticed that the lua filesystem is getting removed for some reason. Obviously this will impact Wordgrinder, so if yours breaks too, run this command to re-install it.

sudo apt-get install lua-filesystem 

Notifications in Lubuntu/Openbox

Customizing Lubuntu is mostly down to personal preference. I like things a certain way and I've listed a tweaks that I do on a fresh install of Lubuntu/Openbox.

Change notification time:

Firstly, we need to install xfce notification daemon by

sudo apt-get install xfce4-notifyd

Then we can change the preferred settings by invoking the following command:

xfce4-notifyd-config

 Volume notification via fn key:

This is an fundamental for any operating system and Openbox can have it too.

The way to get this working is by installing the xfce volume notifications daemon

sudo apt-get install xfce4-volumed

Then we navigate to Menu -> Preferences -> Default applications for LXSession


Click the Autostart tab

Then all we need to do is check the XFCE Volume Daemon box

Then a restart is in order to get the fn+vol keys notification working.

Multi-select, ctrl space not working in Lubuntu

When using PCMANFM in Lubuntu, I like to have the ability to select multiple items via keyboard shortcuts. By default in Lubuntu 14.04 LTS the keyboard shortcut ctrl space should select multiple items but there is a shortcut conflict that is easy to fix.

To fix this issue, go to
Menu -> Preferences -> Keyboard Input Methods

So what we are going to change is the "Ibus Preferences"  which is responsible for switching different keyboard layouts. I'm not interested in having more than one, so change the option that says "Next input option" to

some other keybinding you're not going to use, I chose shift space. I also de-selected the tray icon to minimize space too.