[openbox] man openbox

Dana Jansens dana at orodu.net
Wed Sep 28 13:52:21 EDT 2011


On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 1:38 PM, Jorge Almeida <jjalmeida at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 6:11 PM, Dana Jansens <dana at orodu.net> wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 9:17 AM, Jorge Almeida <jjalmeida at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Yes the autostart stuff changed in 3.5 and the manpage didn't however
>> that flag is for openbox-session more than for general use, but it
>> should probably be in the manpage.
>>
> OK. Meanwhile, maybe you could say here what it does? This is not idle
> curiosity, I like to customize stuff rather than using a "just works"
> approach. This amounts to using a personalized "openbox-session". In
> particular, I want to have my initialization stuff in a single place,
> and it would be helpful to know how the openbox binary interacts with
> the shell script where initialization starts
> (/usr/lib/openbox/openbox-autostart). I don't understand the arguments
> (or flag-value + list of arguments?) appearing in
> /usr/bin/openbox-session (after all, the binary is supposed not to
> accept arguments)
> I already use envdir to set  the environment, and ob starts up
> blinking-fast (on an old computer). It would be nice to reduce usage
> of the shell to a minimum (maybe even  avoiding it completely by using
> execline )

Openbox runs the command it is passed once it has set itself up as a
Window Manager and all the proper startup stuff is complete.
Generally it would be a script that runs multiple applications, and
this ensures they have a properly managed environment started for them
already.

In this case, we run /usr/libexec/openbox-autostart OPENBOX.  If you
read the script, you'll see it passes this on to
openbox-xdg-autostart, to start things that want to run in an OPENBOX
environment.. It could be changed to include GNOME as well if you want
to run things that want to start in a GNOME environment.
openbox-xdg-autostart --help has more info on that.


More information about the openbox mailing list