The Blackbox Window Manager

Of all the X11R6 window managers to run (fvwm, gnome, kde) why Blackbox?

It's a matter of size, and yes size matters. However, this time it's a matter of small is beautiful. Normally I like the KDE window manager (for not so obvious reasons), but mostly run gnome on my Ubuntu developer box. However, for my rather old and outdated Dell Inspiron 3500 laptop, the one I'm using to write this blog, It's limited in resources (see previous post). I like this old extremely outdated Inspiron. It may not be the lightest but it's a workhorse and I have had it for close to a decade. That fact alone speaks volumes about the quality of Dell products and the loyalty component in my social DNA (or that I'm just too frugal for my own good).

Back to what started me writing this post...

Blackbox was the smallest, most full featured window manager I could run on FreeBSD. Okay, fvwm will give it a run for the money but I've never liked the fat frames in fvwm. But today, I finally got around to cleaning up the Blackbox menu and removed all the items that don't apply to FreeBSD running in this limited environment (my Dell not Blackbox).

Here's what I did to remove from the Start Menu things like StarOffice or Mozilla Navigator that are not installed on the massive 4Gb hard drive:

1. copy the default Blackbox menu file to my local directory (e.g. /cpusr/share/blackbox/menu .)
2. change the write protection (chmod 666 ./menu)
3. edit the file (e.g. vi ./menu) and remove entries like
1. [exec] (StarOffice) {soffice}
2. [exec] (Acroread) {acroread}
4. save the file
5. edit the .blackboxrc file and point it to the local menu file
1. session.menuFile: ./menu
6. save the file
   
7. right click on the desktop and tell Blackbox to Reconfigure

That's it. Now I have a custom start menu for Blackbox.