Help:Using Openbox in GNOME

From Openbox

[edit] Starting Openbox with GNOME

Figure 1: The GNOME/Openbox option when logging in

To log into the GNOME desktop environment with Openbox as your window manager, select the "GNOME/Openbox" option when logging in through GDM, which you can see in Figure 1.

If you don't use a graphical log in, you can use the openbox-gnome-session command to start a GNOME session with Openbox as your window manager.

See the getting started guide for more details.

[edit] Accessing gnome-panel with key bindings

Figure 2: The gnome-panel main menu

If you are using gnome-panel in Openbox and want to access it with key bindings, you can use the gnome-panel-control program (which is a part of Openbox) to do so.

Here is an example of two bindings to pop up the gnome-panel's main menu, and to pop up the "Run" dialog:

<keybind key="A-F1">
    <action name="execute"><execute>gnome-panel-control --main-menu</execute></action>
</keybind>
<keybind key="A-F2">
    <action name="execute"><execute>gnome-panel-control --run-dialog</execute></action>
</keybind>

Just add that to the <keyboard> section of your rc.xml configuration file, and change the keys to match your preferences. The keys shown are the defaults used by Metacity, the default window manager for GNOME.

[edit] Logging out

Figure 3: The GNOME logout screen, shown with gnome-session-save

In order to log out of GNOME without going through the gnome-panel, you can use the command gnome-session-save --kill --gui.

Here is an example of a "Log out" option for a menu:

<menu id="root-menu">
  ...
  <item label="Log out">
    <action name="Execute"><execute>gnome-session-save --kill --gui</execute></action>
  </item>
</menu>

You can also use the same command in a key binding to log out by pressing a key combination.

[edit] Nautilus and Openbox

If you don't want Nautilus to draw icons on your desktop, you can disable it with the gconf-editor program. Run gconf-editor and browse to "/apps/nautilus/preferences" and turn off the show desktop option. Another simpler way to get that is to call nautilus with the --no-desktop switch.

If you do want icons from Nautilus on your desktop, you should disable the menu Openbox shows when you right-click on the desktop. Other desktop programs don't have this problem, but with Nautilus you won't be able to access its right-click menu unless you disable Openbox's (or use Shift-Right Click to access the Nautilus menu). In the default configuration rc.xml file, remove the following section (in the "Root" mouse-binding context):

    <mousebind button="Right" action="Press">
      <action name="ShowMenu"><menu>root-menu</menu></action>
    </mousebind>

Also, file a bug report for Nautilus so you won't have to do this in the future.