How to replace menu in fluxbox

[SuSonicTH]

HI!

First of all I want to say thanks for that great distribution! I tried many different small and live distributions and I like Tinycore best for it's size, performance and flexibility.

But now to my Question:

I have Tinycore 3.0 installed and I'm using fluxbox as my windowmanager because I like to have a taskbar. I would like to replace the standard menu with my custom one  to have a submenu with some scrips for wifi or connecting to some smb shares and so on.
The editing of ~/.fluxbox/menu is no problem but it gets overwritten on every startx. How can I prevent that automatic menu generation?

Thanks in Advance for your help,
Michael

P.S.: Please excuse my poor english.

[jerramy]

Has it been added to your /opt/.filetool.lst file?

[roberts]

Actually the window manager's _initmenu is called from startx.

This allows for easy switching of window managers and occurs after restoring from backup or bootlocal.sh.

If your goal is replace our dynamic menu with a custom static one, then I would think a copy should work from within .xsession after waitforX and before the call to "$DESKTOP".

Using a custom static menu will likely break any further automatic updates to such menu.

[SuSonicTH]

If your goal is replace our dynamic menu with a custom static one, then I would think a copy should work from within .xsession after waitforX and before the call to "$DESKTOP".

Using a custom static menu will likely break any further automatic updates to such menu.

Thanks that did the trick!

Best regards,
Michael

[rbacher]

I just experienced the exact same problem, as I prefer to edit the fluxbox menu to suit my particular needs and then keep it that way, so I was very happy to find this thread . . . But, I'm not sure what you mean by putting "a copy" in .xsession.  I see the "waitfor X" and "DESKTOP" is the next line in my .xsession -- so something goes in between.  What exactly goes there?  Thanks. 

[rbacher]

I figured out one way to do it.  First, put the menu you want in the home directory ~/.  Second, tell .xsession to copy that file to the .fluxbox directory by entering the following line in .xsession "cp ~/menu ~/.fluxbox &"

But isn't there a more direct way to accomplish this by disabling the dynamic menu in the first place?  I want a very simple custom menu on a very minimal window manager within a very small linux (that's why I switched to tinycore in the first place).  I want NO extra bells and whistles.  If I did, I would run Ubuntu  (I don't even run tinycore, exactly -- I installed microcore plus Xlibs, Xprogs, and Xfbdev on the XO computer -- the XO is very underpowered so I am aiming for the absolutely smallest setup that will boot fast and run a browser and nothing else -- to date that's microcore (at least til the google chrome OS is adapted to the XO)

[tinypoodle]

IMHO your described goals sound like they contradict with installing fluxbox which is not exactly a very minimal window manager, at least not compared to e.g. flwm(-topside) or
jwm(-snapshot) - and there are several others which are even smaller -, being more than 10 times bigger than any of latter.
(I wouldn't know about memory usage of busybox).

[rbacher]

Okay, good to know.  I am new to linux and learning.  If flwm(-topside) and jwm(-snapshot) are smaller, I will try them instead.  Do you (or anyone reading this) have a suggestion for the smallest window manager that works with microcore?  BTW I used fluxbox because someone else said it was small, hardly because I came up with the idea myself.

[tinypoodle]

Ah ok, now makes more sense... Of course compared with default wm's (or whole desktop environment) in some other distros, busybox could be considered relatively small, it is all relative  

You can use "manager" as a search term in appsbrowser, to have them filtered out  

Looks like tinywm being smallest, also evilwm being pretty small, but question is also what is minimal functionality you request for your purposes.

For reference: my jwm-snapshot is using 2760 Kb of RES memory atm.
EDIT: checked flwm_topside as in base of tinycore: 1948 Kb RES memory

But isn't there a more direct way to accomplish this by disabling the dynamic menu in the first place?  

I'd guess that might also depend upon configuration of particular wm.
In jwm i think you could just try to comment the line

Code: [Select]

<Include>/usr/local/tce.menu/menu</Include>
in ~/.jwmrc out, or possibly replace it by an 'include' pointing to your own customized menu file.

[rbacher]

but question is also what is minimal functionality you request for your purposes.

The minimal functionality I am trying to set up at this point is (1) fast boot (given that I am working with an XO computer which is very slow) and (2) a web browser. That's it.  I am looking forward to the Google Chrome OS but it's not ready for the XO yet.  So I am using microcore plus the minimum.  That appears to be microcore plus Xlibs.gz, Xprogs.gz, Xfbdev.tcz, a window manager and a browser.  I got to the point of installing the window manager, and I installed fluxbox based on information that it was small, light and fast.  That's when I found this thread because I was having a problem with the fluxbox menu.  But based on your information that other window managers are smaller, I will delete fluxbox and try one of the others (at which point I am off topic of this thread).

[rbacher]

I tried both flwm and jwm.  I didn't like flwm -- it had the same problem as fluxbox (menu dynamically overwritten when startx runs) but jwm allows a static menu, so I am using jwm.  So far I am quite happy with it (and I have now been able to get the minimal set up I was trying to get -- 25 seconds from cold boot to window manager on a little XO computer, and the menu stays the same).