Today I begin a series of posts on my favorite GUI desktop; Fluxbox. I intend this series to cover the entire window manager from the most basic changing of styles to in-depth configuration file tweaks that you can use to fully customize Fluxbox.
I have used and enjoyed Fluxbox for nearly ten years now and I have been using and tweaking the same set of configuration files the whole time. I hope to intrigue you, my readers, enough that you might choose to see what you can do with Fluxbox.

What is Fluxbox?
Directly from fluxbox.org

Fluxbox is a windowmanager for X that was based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. It is very light on resources and easy to handle but yet full of features to make an easy, and extremely fast, desktop experience.

A window manager (aka WM) is quite different from a Desktop Environment (aka DE). An example of a DE would be the “Gnome” desktop. A desktop environment typically consists of icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers, and desktop widgets and a “window manager” that is responsible for creating the container that is called a “window”. This is the border around the application itself and the bar across the top which contains the minimize, maximize and close buttons.

A stand-alone window manager, like Fluxbox is just that, a window manager and, thats it. No bells and whistles. No desktop take-over. No icons. Therefore a window manager is much lighter on system resources and usually faster. Fluxbox is fast.

Your first configuration change

The Fluxbox Menu

The First and easiest thing to change about Fluxbox is, your style. The default system styles are listed in the menu. The Fluxbox menu is opened by right clicking anywhere on the open desktop. So it’s “right click > fluxbox menu > system styles” Most Linux distros come with quite a few Fluxbox styles pre-installed. Just select one by name, click on it and, your style will change instantly. No restart required.

This is not even scratching the surface of the configuration of Fluxbox. But, it is the end for today. I hope to see you following ths series and possibly testing out Fluxbox as we go.

Happy Slackin
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