Some Basic Information:
Blackbox is a fast lite Window Manager that uses up a very small ammount of resources.
Blackbox Home Page
Download Locations: .tar.gz
Latest Stable Version: 0.65.0
Installation
You will first need to download the source .tar.gz and then uncompress it with the following command:
gzip -dc blackbox-0.65.0.tar.gz | tar xvvf –
Easy enough, now you will have to compile blackbox to actually be able to use it. You will do that with these commands.
cd blackbox-0.65.0
./configure
make
make install
make clean
Now that you have completed installing blackbox you will have to start it with xwindows to actually be able to use it.
Create (or edit) a file in your home directory called .xinitrc
pico ~/.xinitrc
and enter the following lines:
exec blackbox
Do this using whichever text editor you prefer.
Configuration
Blackbox is already configured to run, so after you enter the one command into .xinitrc and fireup startx you are already to go. With the default menu and background and settings anyways. How boring. I am now going to explain how to edit the menu, change the background, install new themes etc.
You can edit the menu by hand by editing the file /usr/local/share/blackbox/menu with your favorite text editor, or you can download one of the configuration utilities listed below. I recommend whiteBOX, its very easy to use and configures most aspects of blackbox. If you are going to use whiteBOX, you must compile it before using it. You do that by typing this.
gzip -dc whiteBOX-0.5.tar.gz | tar xvvf –
cd whiteBOX-0.5
./configure
make
make install
Now startup whiteBOX by typing:
./whiteBOX
A box will pop up saying its going to load the default configuration file, hit ok. You will now be entered into whiteBOX, the first menu you are faced with is the blackbox menu configuration. You have to load the menu configuration file before you can edit it. So click on Load, and load the file /usr/local/share/blackbox/menu
Now go nuts and change the menu, just start clicking, you cant break anything to bad 😉 You can change the title of the menu, add progams, folders, subfolders, remove them, etc.
When you are done playing around in here, click on the “Style Editor” tab at the bottom of the program, this will take you to the area where you can change the overall look of blackbox, ie colors, fonts, etc. Im not going to go into depth on how to make your blackbox look pretty, but this is the place where you do it.
Moving on you now have the “Background Tool” tab, this is where you can change the background. It is very easy to change the background with this program so I will leave that up to you guys to figure out.
The final tab is the “Keybinding Tool”, this is where you setup all your keybindings to make some tasks alot more easier to do.
Adding a theme
First download a theme, or two. themes.freshmeat.net is a good place to get themes from.
After you download a theme copy it to your install directory. The default is /usr/local/share/blackbox now unless you changed it do what I do 🙂
mv theme.tar.gz /usr/local/share/blackbox
cd /usr/local/share/blackbox
gzip -dc theme.tar.gz | tar xvvf –
Replace theme.tar.gz with the filename of the theme that you downloaded. Most of the themes out there should uncompress to the right directories, if they do, right click on your desktop, goto Styles, and choose the theme you just installed.