[openbox] New user - openbox 3.4 - two questions

[Mikael Magnusson]

On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, David Feldman wrote:

> I'm using Openbox 3.4 with xorg and have a couple of basic questions. My
> project involves manually controlling the layout of the display screen so
> that every program runs with -geometry specification.
>
> 1. Openbox is re-positioning a window of one application (xv) where I
> specified in the -geometry parameter (of xv) that the window would be along
> the top of the X display area (that is, -geometry +400+0, for example, where
> +0 means "top"). The window ends up maybe 20 pixels down from the top of the
> screen - it initially starts at the top of the screen, then seems to be
> immediate relocated vertically down this way. I can start xterm displays
> successfully this way (aligned to the top of the screen) but with xv I get
> this unexpected repositioning. I tried editing ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml, to
> change the section <resize><popupShow> from Nonpixel to Never, but that was
> basically a guess and it didn't help.

This is probably xv doing something strange. When i try it i do get it 
positioned at 400,0, but xprop says this:

WM_NORMAL_HINTS(WM_SIZE_HINTS):
                 user specified location: 399, 19
                 program specified size: 480 by 270

which seems a little strange, and makes me want to blame xv :).

> 2. I am interested in finding a task bar or similar utility to use with
> openbox. I'd like to find something that lets me navigate among open windows
> by a mouse click, rather than alt-TAB which I'm now using. The catch is I'm
> looking for something that avoids library dependencies to the extent
> possible - several such utilities I tried had unresolved (.so) dependencies
> and in my application, I'm trying to minimize these dependencies because
> they can lead to "dependency hell" where I am chasing for too long various
> libraries-needed-by-other-libraries and such. Any suggestion?

There are various very simplistic panels, for example fspanel 
http://mika.l3ib.org/s/fspanel-0.8beta1.tar.bz2 (mirrored, because the 
original web site is long since disappeared) and our more updated version, 
which is a little unfinished though, obpanel/rspanel 
http://git.icculus.org/?p=mikachu/rspanel.git;a=summary
if you click the top link that says 'snapshot' under the 'shortlog' header 
you'll get a tarball. It has some dependencies, but nothing openbox 
doesn't depend on too.

--
Mikael Magnusson