Aug 13 2009

LXDE configuration HOWTO draft completed

After talking with Ben (yngwin), I found that there really wasn’t anyone working on documentation related to LXDE inside of Gentoo. So, I decided that I would write a HOWTO for getting it installed and configured. I finished the document this morning, and uploaded it to my Developer webspace. You may see a working copy of the document there, and if you want to see the xml, you have two options. Firstly, when looking at the finished copy, you append the following to the end of the URL:

?passthru=1

making the full URL:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~nathanzachary/documentation/lxde_1.0.xml?passthru=1

and that will show you the XML. Secondly, you can view Bug 281345, and click on the attachment. Hopefully the documentation team will pick up the guide in the near future, and commit it. The only holdup that I can foresee is that LXDE is still available only through the testing (~arch) branch.

|:| Zach |:|

Aug 13 2009

Updates made to the Openbox HOWTO

I have made several changes to the Openbox HOWTO. There were many typographical errors that I didn’t catch the first time around, and package links that weren’t added. Here’s a full list of the updates for version 1.4:

  • In code listing 2.5, changed the $ to # as the operation requires root actions.
  • Added a note to the 2.5 listing about becoming root before the command.
  • In code listing 2.6, fixed the typographical error (7gt; instead of gt;).
  • In code listing 2.6, made the
  • In code listing 2.8, fixed the typographical error (extra > in closing tag).
  • In code listing 2.8, fixed the typographical error (missing closing “).
  • Added a link to the package information for conky before code listing 2.10.
  • Added a link to the package information for feh after code listing 2.10.
  • Added a link to the package information for nitrogen after code listing 2.10.
  • Removed the library dependency bug reference for nitrogen.
  • In terminals section, changed “customized” to “customised” for consistency.
  • In file managers, fixed typographical error for Nautilus (a “bit” heavy).

If you would like to see the new document revisions before it gets committed to the official documentation repository, it is available on my Developer webspace. You may also view the XML for version 1.4 via Gentoo Bug 256693.

|:| Zach |:|

Aug 10 2009

LXappearance and icon themes

After having recently reinstalled Gentoo on my main production machine, I thought I would look into some theming to make things more aesthetically pleasing. I installed a bunch of GTK themes that I ended up not liking, so I got rid of them. I use Openbox with a bunch of LXDE applications installed to ease the process of customisation. One such application is LXappearance. Getting rid of the unwanted themes from the LXappearance menu wasn’t all that difficult. I simply went to /usr/share/themes and removed the respective folders. However, I couldn’t seem to get the unwanted icon themes to go away. If I’m not mistaken, icon themes are usually installed to /usr/share/icons. When I went to manually delete the icon theme folders, however, there were no such directories. Hmmmmmmmm…

Since searching the web didn’t yield any significant results, I thought I would go to the source code and figure out just what happens when one installs an icon theme using LXappearance. In /usr/share/lxappearance there is a script called install-icon-theme.sh, and it contains the following line:

export XDG_DATA_HOME=”$HOME/.local/share”;

That lead me to check that respective directory. Bingo, there were my icon theme folders. I simply deleted the folders, and the respective icon theme choices were no longer present in LXappearance. I was simply excited as it was my first success of the day. 🙂

|:| Zach |:|