Fluxbox is a great lightweight X window manager based on Blackbox 0.61.1 built using C++. Fluxbox has a simple friendly user-interface quite easy to use for any user, and does not require a high machine performance to use it. Been a long time since last Fluxbox stable release from two years, finally Fluxbox 1.3 has been released today with quite a few new features we will take a look at along with installation methods for Fluxbox 1.3.
What’s new in FluxBox 1.3
- Added support for bidirectional text, #2801836.
- Allow to override ‘Focus New Windows’ via .fluxbox/apps
- New actions:
- ActivateTab
- ArrangeWindowsVertical
- New ‘MoveN’ and ‘ClickN’ action support for keys file
- New focus model ‘StrictMouseFocus’. This will affect focus when closing, moving, lowering windows, changing desktops, etc, whereas the ‘MouseFocus’ model will only change focus when you move the mouse.
- New “background: unset” property for use in overlays.
- Allowing relative paths for background images in style files.
- Allowing matching screen number in ClientPattern.
- Removed rootcommand from init, as fbsetbg is run automatically nowadays.
- Removed line style resources from init file.
Install Fluxbox 1.3
Installations methods is quite the same in most linux distributions, for now you have two ways to install/upgrade Fluxbox 1.3 in your distribution by compiling the source code or installing it through git repository, cause this release still not available on official repositories for most common distributions available such as ” Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Crunchbang, …”
Installation by compiling the source code
First Download Fluxbox 1.3 source code.
Second usually when you compile any package using command line it require extra dependencies you have to install to be able to compile the source code, for example when i started to configure fluxbox packages for my system configurations, the process didn’t complete cause it requires the X Window System libraries and headers. so i had to install these packages mentioned at fluxbox-wiki ” xlibs-dev, x-window-system-dev, and x11-devel ” unfortunately i couldn’t install them on Ubuntu cause they are not available on the repository or obsolete packages, so i found a replacement for this packages on Ubuntu repository called libx11-dev, this package contain a development libraries and header for X window manager.
After installing libx11-dev package configuration process done and the rest of building process for fluxbox 1.3 on Ubuntu as well.
Run terminal
extract the tar.gz using
open the output directory and run these commands one by one
make
sudo make install
or you can run all of them in the same time using this command
I recommend to use them one by one incase something goes wrong you will know exactly in which step the error happen.
that’s it for building fluxbox using source code.
Second installation method Using git repositories
another installation method you can use is available on fluxbox-wiki along with the first installation method for compiling the source code.
Also check Fluxbox wiki FAQ for more tips, and installation methods for many different distributions.
Fluxbox 1.3 Screenshots
Helpful links
Fluxbox window manager Here.
Using git method for installing fluxbox Here.
Installing Fluxbox on openBSD Here.
Fluxbox wiki FAQ Here.