LXDE environment looks and behaves like openbox

crunchbanglxdeopenbox

I have two logins on my box, one for work and the other for personal (I'm on crunchbang). Both run LXDE by default.

As of yesterday the work login started acting like an Openbox session, ie you had to hover over a window before you could enter text, the windows could not be dragged to another point on the screen and the maximise button wouldn't work.

The personal login, however, is working as expected and LXDE is as it should be.
I can also log into a Xfce session and it is working fine (on work and personal logins) so the conflict appears to be between LXDE and Openbox.

The only thing that I can think I've done is to install a few packages from the repositories and to do an apt-get update.

If someone can tell me how to show the latest things installed from the repositories then I'll be able to tell you what they were.

I've tried removing (with the purge option) LXDE and reinstalling it but to no avail.

Can anyone think of a way for me to get LXDE working properly again? Are there any logs that I can trawl through to work out the problem? How do I find the last things installed from the repositories (so I can remove them)?

Best Answer

As warl0ck noted, LXDE uses openbox as the WM, so you may just have a problem in your configuration settings.

Hopefully these LXDE file locations should get you back on course:

The config files of LXPanel are stored in ~/.config/lxpanel/.
Under LXDE, we use a different profile name - LXDE. So it's in ~/.config/lxpanel/LXDE. In this way, if you changed the config of the panel under LXDE, it won't interfere other desktop environments.
If the config files are missing, lxpanel loads system-wide config in /usr/share/lxpanel/profile/ instead.

Related Solutions

GNOME recognizes a second monitor once it’s plugged in. Does Openbox not

xrandr1 may be the solution you are looking for so that you don't need to log out/log in.

From How to use xrandr:

The old days where you had to restart X when plugging a new monitor are gone. With RandR 1.2, you can plug/unplug monitors whenever you want. Running the following line will query all outputs and enable them with their default mode:

$ xrandr --auto

Ideally, the default config works for you. Otherwise, configure xrandr as needed. This is probably a good enough solution for most people to start using the display without logging out.

For details on automatically detecting when the monitor is plugged in, I have added an answer2 to the existing thread A tool for automatically applying RandR configuration when external display is plugged in

LXDE (Openbox): add “resize corner” to the window

Yes, something like it currently exists, but it is not the same resize grip in the corner that is used in gtk themes. Something like that would need to be coded into openbox.

Add a Handle In your themerc for the theme you are using, you can set window.handle.width to a number of pixels and handle will appear below the window1. The handle includes diagonal resizing tools in the left and right corners. Unfortunately, this method does take up a bit more real estate than the gtk style corner grip.

For example, in your themerc, this would create a 6 pixel wide handle:

window.handle.width: 6

Specifies the size of the window handle. The window handle is the piece of decorations on the bottom of windows. A value of 0 means that no handle is shown.

To activate changes made to the theme, run openbox --reconfigure.

Change Border Width
You may also change the border.width setting in your themerc to make the window border wider. This increases the area you can drag, but also increases the visual border of the window, so again you are sacrificing screen real estate which sucks.

Drag with Alt + Right-Click
You can position the cursor anywhere over the window, hold the Alt key and hold the right mouse button to resize the nearest window edge. This includes corners. The only downside here is that this requires a two hand operation. You may be able to create a custom key binding that is preferred.

The mouse binding for resizing is in ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml or whichever the appropriate rc file is in the ~/.config/openbox/ directory and looks like this:

  <mousebind button="A-Right" action="Drag">
    <action name="Resize"/>
  </mousebind>

Best Answer

Related Solutions

GNOME recognizes a second monitor once it’s plugged in. Does Openbox not

LXDE (Openbox): add “resize corner” to the window

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