LinuxBBQ

Still tryin to decide distro/WM.
Sorry to create more threads, but didn't want to make my BBQ base thread more complex for a specific topic.

Been trying a lot of Openbox, Fluxbox, and Blackbox. Unfortunately I like all 3, or parts of each.

Would like panel with tabbed app switcher, clock, battery info, volume controls(Alsa). Menu button, calendar, CPU/RAM/Swap info optional.

Like Openbox menu with terminal on top list. Like parts of both default Flux/Black panels. Was planning on Lemonbar after seein dkegs thread this morning, but after tryin Space Oddity this evening, wondering about tint2 now also.

Curious which box others like best. What panels or conkys they run for laptop necessary info. Any other suggestions for boxes?

Also, can custom panels be disabled for XFCE, IceWM, or JWM sessions? (Only active for Open/Flux/Blackbox?)

WMs are all about personal taste, so better try and choose your poison. Personally I prefer Fluxbox over the other boxes. It's my WM to go. Excepting the pipemenus, which are trully nice, Fluxbox can do a lot more and its plain text configuration is much simpler than Openbox's xml. The learning curve is also higher but it really worths going through all the ample documentation. Blackbox feels like a simpler fluxbox which can be enough if you don't want need a ton of the Fluxbox capabilities. For tilers my choice is bspwm.

Would like panel with tabbed app switcher, clock, battery info, volume controls(Alsa). Menu button, calendar, CPU/RAM/Swap info optional.

It seems like tint2 is the panel you want. Not sure if CPU/RAM/swap can be done in tint2. I think it was planned to be implemented, but I haven't used it in a while. For the rest, you can get it all; pager, etc...

Also, can custom panels be disabled for XFCE, IceWM, or JWM sessions? (Only active for Open/Flux/Blackbox?)

The boxes have autostart/startup configurations, so you can choose what to enable for each WM. Keep .xinitrc (or .xprofile if that's your case) for the common things and the autostarts for the WM specifics. For bspwm you can also add the stuff you want to launch into ~/config/bspwmrc

I don't really play much with the 'boxes but I heard tell of the holy trinity of openbox, tint2 and err conky, I think.
most of these things are alterable with a text file, or using a different tray (stalonetray is another i think) you might even be able to pull in the xfce panel into openbox.
i am happy with a bar (no bar recently) with date/time load ascii battery thing, although don't really care, it's either plugged in or it tells me when it's going to die. apps for me are mostly full screen on workspaces, or meta-tab to choose, still, that's my workflow.
Sounds to me like you want a #! style desktop.

If you want a panel with a menu button, try lxpanel or fbpanel. lxpanel is easier to customize (right click on the panel and use the provided menu), fbpanel is a little lighter (lxpanel was derived from fbpanel.) tint2 can have a menu, but it's a bit more work to set it up.

As snap says, there is always a way to configure each wm separately.

I don't use a panel on my current desktop. I haven't use a stacking window manager on a regular basis for a long time, but of the boxes, I probably like jwm best. (-:

Thanks everyone.
I'd like to try them all at some point, basically just really nneded a battery monitor so it quit dyin in my lap, lol. Conky seems nice, but didn't wanna have to minimize things to check info.

So many choices building from near scratch :D

Without going too much into the details, I would say:

- Openbox, obconf and obmenu
- tint2, and heavy editing (refer to the manpage for stuff like battery meter etc)

the detailed part is:

you can have an automatic warning system that prints a no-nonsense warning (using xosd-bin and osd-cat) on your screen when battery reaches 10% or so. Then take any WM (90% of them will let you configure easily). Customize to do the following:
- Switching windows/tabs with Alt-Tab or so. This is default behaviour in most WMs.
- for opening a terminal you can assign Alt-Enter. Let it execute "x-terminal-emulator"
- make a keybind for OSD-info, so you can quickly see time, date, battery level, volume level, whatever. This is in most BBQ releases a file named "osd" which is in /usr/local/bin/osd. Edit it as root to make changes. You usually find a commented line that contains the string "BATT0" or so there. Change this to the right path, according to "ls /sys/class/power_supply". There will be one with AC and one with BATT and a number. If yours is BATT1, change the string from BATT0 to BATT1. Uncomment the line, save the file. Assign a keybind to run "osd", or test in terminal by running "osd". See also http://www.linuxbbq.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1135

Seriously, most WMs use the same backbone. It's just the question how you configure them. I like no-headache WMs like spectrwm (tiling).

Yes - I used dkeg's notification via dunst for a while, which uses the same backed, perhaps you would have your eyes open with where certain data comes from. for example.
Oh yeah, it's just a text file!

Or you can have it still easier with evilwm. You cannot even configure too much. No bars, no panels, though you could load them. Every app is running full screen. You can have all the stats on different workspaces showing in a terminal window, like htop as system monitor, lm-sensors for CPU and temperature etc. And of course tty-clock showing the time on another workspace. Absolutely effective and distraction free.

It's all a kind of "mental" problem. When you come from a full-featured DE you are used to have bling-bling and icons and shit, everything happening automatically. Of course most users accept this as "default behaviour" and say "as long as it works OOTB, and I don't need to do anything I'm happy".
And then there comes a time when you ask yourself: how can I make shit doing how I want it without using fast-food solutions? An excellent exercise is the "7 Days in TTY", which can of course be translated to "7 Days with Terminal Applications". You probably start browsing the repos for terminal applications that solve certain problems. This is the first step into the BBQ direction, but actually there's a second step. I give an example of the progression:

In XFCE4 there's a panel and an icon to pop up a volume slider. This little app is xfce4-mixer, if I remember right, and it needs xfce4-panel for this kind of behaviour. xfce4-panel probably still relies on dbus-x11 and the whole set of gtk libraries, but let's ignore this.
You could say: I only need to change the volume, no need for a mixer. You would install volumeicon from the repos and add it to the panel. You could of course also use the xfce4-keybindings to change volume with keyboard shortcuts. Let's imagine the funny situation when X11 breaks due to some upgrade. You cannot log in to xfce4, only stay in the TTY. You listen to music and want the volume to be changed. "xfce4-mixer" yields "NO DISPLAY:0" or so. Sure, X doesn't work, so the mixer doesn't show.
Sure, you could now run "alsamixer" and change the volume. The BBQ brothers are clever enough to add this package to all releases. What if you don't have alsamixer? Isn't alsamixer just *another* frontend for a volume changer? Yes, it is: the actual program that changes the volume is "amixer", and you can feed it:
amixer set Master 50%
See the amixer manpage for more.
This progression (XFCE4 frontend -> X11-ish frontend -> ncurses frontend -> actual command) is what will make you understand how "work environments" work. It's absolutely unimportant which "window manager" manages your windows. Any will do. There's not *that much* window managing if you use a terminal with tmux and a few keybinds for notifications, volume switch, opening dmenu_run, opening a browser, moving a certain window to another workspace. As soon as you get rid of the rat you have actually saved hours of clickypointy.
tl;dr: get back to the roots, and don't let yourself be distracted by window managers (that are anyway just forks of forks of forks, recently).

^ superbly put.
nothing to add to that.

^^ Amen.

catfood, it is quite simple. You just have to find out what your personal preferences are. Try them, feel them, tweak them and eventually you will know. :)