Salix Forums

It's time to revive our Fluxbox edition! Here is a first beta that is mostly untested for now, so feel free to try it out and post your findings.

The Fluxbox edition is designed to bring a minimalist environment to your desktop. The default desktop layout is comprised only of the Fluxbox panel and the right click menu will bring up the Fluxbox menu, so it should be really light on resources. The file manager that is used is PCManFM.

The default browser in this beta is Firefox. The office applications that are included are Abiword and Gnumeric. Whaawmp is the default video player and Exaile is the audio media library application. Of course, Salix Codecs Installer is also there to install all kinds of restricted codecs that you might need.

The Fluxbox menu uses xdgmenumaker to create a list of installed applications, similar to what you find in other environments. This list is also translated to your own locale.

Other applications included are the usual stuff that goes in Salix releases, like the Transmission torrent client, the Claws-mail email client, the Salix System Tools etc.

The application selection is not written in stone yet, so feel free to propose alternatives if you think they are better than the applications already included. For example, I'd like to have a dual-pane file manager instead of PCManFM, but everyone I tried seems lacking in one way or another.

The 32-bit release includes both an i686 SMP capable, PAE-enabled kernel and also an i486, non-SMP, non-PAE kernel, so you can use this with CPUs with no PAE support.

NOTE: due to the nature of Fluxbox, the menu is not automatically updated when a new application is installed or removed. You need to refresh the menu through the respective option in the "Fluxbox" section of the right-click menu. The upside is that the menu loads amazingly fast even if you have ancient hardware.

You can download this beta from the following links:

Salix Fluxbox 14.1beta1 (i486/i686, 32-bit)
(size: 682MB, md5: 66d81b6173b488ea6715c5bd412bea34)
Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/salix/f ... o/download
torrent: http://people.salixos.org/gapan/iso/sal ... so.torrent

Salix64 Fluxbox 14.1beta1 (x86_64, 64-bit)
(size: 625MB, md5: 3b66a1ea2591d952ab9ae158f9c9d571)
Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/salix/f ... o/download
torrent: http://people.salixos.org/gapan/iso/sal ... so.torrent

Have fun testing!

Hi gapan

Fluxbox 14.1 beta1 has the gvfs bug i reported here http://forum.salixos.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=6103

Haven't tested it very much yet but so far nothing else to report.

Thanks ibka, as I posted in that other thread, this should be fixed with the upgraded package.

Also, in the beta, right after installation, there is an entry in the menu for feh, which is wrong. This is fixed by upgrading the feh package from the repos and refreshing the menu.

At last my favored box.
Will need some working to make it my comfortable home again.

Some questions:

Why a media player which does not play audio CDs and then a second program which will do this
and which I personally dislike since I never got Exaile to work properly. Why not just one all in one
like gnome-mplayer?

To keep it small why include this monster program GIMP. Again personally I have no use for it.
it scares me, and is the first be to be removed from the box.

Latest firefox version is now 31 and there are newer kernel versions as well.

Good that "mc" is included that has dual-panel layout. How about emelfm2 ?
Of more than 12 FM I have tested "mc" is still the best in my opinion.

I am posting this from this Beta1 version. no bug found yet

On second thought since I am running Salix-14.1 Xfce with Fluxbox, mate-panel and the latest updated programs and kernels there is actually no need for me for another Fluxbox. I will test so.

Thanks for the input Atip.

Atip wrote:Why a media player which does not play audio CDs and then a second program which will do this
and which I personally dislike since I never got Exaile to work properly. Why not just one all in one
like gnome-mplayer?

I believe I have answered this lots of times. We need media players based on gstreamer that cannot play restricted codecs by default. Nothing else will do. If you know a better gstreamer-based application, go on. But mplayer/vlc/xine or whatever else has support for everything compiled in, will not do for the iso. You're free to install whatever you like after Salix installation though.

Atip wrote:To keep it small why include this monster program GIMP. Again personally I have no use for it.
it scares me, and is the first be to be removed from the box.

Yes, we could replace gimp with mtpaint for the fluxbox edition.

Atip wrote:Latest firefox version is now 31 and there are newer kernel versions as well.

We don't use the latest firefox. We use the ESR version. And then we don't switch to the largest version of ESR as soon as it comes out. Notice how I use the word "largest", not "latest". Firefox 31.0esr is not newer than 24.7.0esr, they were released at the same time. In fact, 24.8.0esr when it comes out will be newewr than 31.0esr and will come out at the same time as 31.0.1esr. We always switch when x.2.0 comes out, the first two revisions in any ESR branch are always testing ones.

Atip wrote:Good that "mc" is included that has dual-panel layout. How about emelfm2 ?
Of more than 12 FM I have tested "mc" is still the best in my opinion.

I tried emelfm2. It just doesn't cut it. Gnome-commander could have been a good option, but it uses old libraries that I am not willing to support. The fact that you say that mc is the best of the bunch says it all...

Thanks Gapan

Atip wrote:To keep it small why include this monster program GIMP. Again personally I have no use for it.
it scares me, and is the first be to be removed from the box.

gapan wrote: Yes, we could replace gimp with mtpaint for the fluxbox edition.

I have wondered, as well, for a long time why ImageMagic has such a hidden existence always present in all distros
yet never shown on a menu. A shame for such a great program. As an ordinary mortal my GIM is well taken care
first by the old program "xv" followed by mtpaint or ImageMagic.

I am copying some useful files to my working box like wm-logout.

Installed multi media codex and as expected exaile does not play an audio CD.
Playback error encounted.
uridecodebin4
I really hate this program.

feh now working.

Seems to be a nice program. Set background with it just to check.

gapan wrote:The application selection is not written in stone yet, so feel free to propose alternatives if you think they are better than the applications already included.

Salix Fluxbox 14.1beta1 / FULL:



Checked, everything works!

My choice for Salix Fluxbox (Openbox&MATE):
Firefox+Claws Mail = SeaMonkey
Geany+Meld+Leafpad = KKEdit
Whaaw+Exaile = Budgie

Atip wrote:Installed multi media codex and as expected exaile does not play an audio CD.
Playback error encounted.
uridecodebin4
I really hate this program.

I really can't understand this hate. The only viable alternative I can think of is quodlibet. Is there anything else? If a a GTK+2/3 application that only plays CDs and nothing else exists, I wouldn't mind including it.

For a simple audio player with no other features, I just found pogo: https://launchpad.net/pogo
It doesn't look bad, but exaile does so much more than that. Pogo doesn't play audio CDs either.

posixru wrote:Firefox+Claws Mail = SeaMonkey

That won't do for several reasons. One of them is that there are no langpacks for seamonkey and I have exactly zero interest in maintaining them too.

posixru wrote:Geany+Meld+Leafpad = KKEdit

That looks ancient.

posixru wrote:Whaaw+Exaile = Budgie

Have you actually tried it in Salix? It will never work in 14.1, it needs libraries that are newer than the ones we have.