Support Thread for Openbox GUI

[freamon]

From the .next alpha image thread:

Okay, some notes from my tests last night. I'm using the OpenBox GUI

• Not sure why "Switch WiFi Hardware" and "Switch WiFi Applet" are seperate, surely if you're enabling hardware, you'll want the applet so it'll connect
• Pressing the Pandora key will always move your mouse and open the menu in the same place. Can you not leave the mouse in it's present position?
• "Toggle Warlock Bar" is not perminant, not sure if it's supposed to be
• Had to set up wireless connection with "sudo nm-applet"
• Trying to connect to my work network, just instantly disconnects me (log below)

nm-applet log

Spoiler

** (nm-applet:2688): CRITICAL **: nm_connection_need_secrets: assertion `connection != NULL' failed
** (nm-applet:2688): WARNING **: get_secrets_cb: error getting connection secrets: (32) No agents were available for this request.

Spoiler

Edit: Lunchtime test:

• TreeSheets - click on File->New and the Okay and Cancel buttons are too thin to read any text (Is this just an OpenBox UI setting?), otherwise seems ok

Edit:Oh, and a big one, you can't seem to Alt+Tap to right click. Is this an OpenBox setting too?

Re: Switch Hardware ON / Switch Applet ON. I'm sure there was a good reason why I did it like that. It might just have been because I was using wicd instead of nm-applet at the time. Or maybe I thought that people might want to kill it again after it'd got the network on. These don't seem like good reasons, though, even to me. It can certainly be changed so that, 'switch hardware ON' always calls 'switch applet ON'.

Re mouse movement / menu. Openbox always opens the root menu under the mouse cursor. It's setup to move it to the top-left, because otherwise - if the cursor happens to be in the right of the screen - then submenus start appearing the the left of it, in a non-intuitive way. Changing this would involve changing Openbox's source code (which *maybe* I can do, I'll have a look).

Re Toggle wbar. Do you mean that it's not persistent over reboots? If so, you can change whether it starts up with the GUI or not, via Menu -> GUI Config -> Openbox -> edit autostart.

Re networking. At the time that Openbox GUI was merged in to the image, I didn't know how aTc was wanting to solve the problem that Network Manager had a runtime dependency on ConsoleKit (either startup ConsoleKit beforehand, or change NetworkManager to not use ConsoleKit, or change it to use systemd instead). I know how he's doing it now, so I can start fixing these problems (currently, nm-applet can't setup new connection credentials: you have to set them up in XFCE, or via Menu -> Connectivity -> Edit Network Connections).

Re: treesheets. Nope, happens in XFCE too (yay!)

Re: alt-tap = right-click. Doesn't seem to work in XFCE, either. I'll look into it for openbox.

 

[pmprog]

I've just downloaded Audacious using PNDManager, but it doesn't even show in my Programs menu. I even rebooted to double check. However, if I swap into XFCE, it shows...

 

[freamon]

I just downloaded audacious to check - it showed up in my menu no probs. I assume it's popped up in yours by now.

PNDs showing in the Programs menu is a 2-step process. First, pndnotifyd has to notice that there's a new PND and create a .desktop file for it. Then menu-cached has to notice that there's a new .desktop file, and create a menu entry for it.

Usually, menu-cached is fairly instant (because it only has to monitor /usr/share/applications), and the thing you're waiting for is pndnotifyd (partly because it has to monitor the root of each SD card, plus 1 level of every subfolder on each SD card, plus the usual pandora/menu pandora/desktop pandora/apps).

You can give pndnotifyd a hand by editing /etc/pandora/conf/desktop to let it know exactly where your PNDs are. This'll also reduce the startup time between the 'openbox' screen showing, and it accepting input.

I say "usually", because in this instance, it looks it was menu-cached that had fell asleep (audacious showing up in XFCE shows that pndnotify had done its job). This happened to me once, too. I think it's mostly because .next is operating a little shower than SZ, with a bit more random CPU activity. Hopefully, a big part of this is just because it's running from a SD card rather than the NAND.

 

[pmprog]

Ah yes, it's decided to pop up now... Bizarre, because I had rebooted a couple of times since installed it... Thanks anyway

 

[Klumpen]

OpenBox still won't appear in my Gui-select-screen since the installation. :/

Do I have to install something else too?

 

[KickAss]

just in case someone was wondering why the "System" submenu may throw openbox pipe errors:
 

EDIT: do you have the Community Codec PND? I remember you saying that it didn't break the menu for you before, so you might still have it. I just tried it, and it broke the System menu for me too. If so, deleting it should solve the problem.

 
took me a while to figure that out.

 

[Binky]

Does anyone know what other pnds (other than the ccp) can cause the menu to bork?

I've got a huge number of pnds on my sd card, with the symptoms that, with the card in the PNDs menu takes seconds to open and is mssing some categories.

With the SD card removed, everything works as expected.

 

[KickAss]

Does anyone know what other pnds (other than the ccp) can cause the menu to bork?

the only thing i noticed was that my community codec pack PND was named SOMETHING.pnd.pnd

maybe the double .pnd suffix causes some parsing error?

just a wild guess here, as i dont really know how the menu is being built, yet. 

 

[freamon]

Hello,

This thread was intended specifically for supporting Openbox as part of the firmware - as found in the .next image. If you're trying it with SuperZaxxon via the PND, it would be better if you posted to the other thread (please).

Anyways, to answer your questions:

OpenBox still won't appear in my Gui-select-screen since the installation. :/

Do I have to install something else too?

No. Assuming you're using SuperZaxxon, and have run "Install Openbox", there's nothing else to run. I don't know why it wouldn't update the gui-selection. Maybe try running "Install Openbox" again. If your /etc/pandora/conf/gui.conf file isn't being updated for some reason, you could try doing it manually; it should look like:


XFCE4;The full desktop Environment;startxfce4;xfce4-session-logout --logout
MiniMenu;A very simple but flexible menu;startmmenu;stopmmenu
Openbox;Highly configurable window manager;openbox-pandora-session;openbox-exit
GUISwitch;Select your GUI on bootup;\/usr\/pandora\/scripts\/op_switchgui.sh;;NOSWITCH

Does anyone know what other pnds (other than the ccp) can cause the menu to bork?

the only thing i noticed was that my community codec pack PND was named SOMETHING.pnd.pnd
maybe the double .pnd suffix causes some parsing error?

just a wild guess here, as i dont really know how the menu is being built, yet.

The full process for how the menu works:

1) libpndnotifyd scans for PNDs and creates .desktop files for them (in /usr/share/applications/). These files look like:


[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Name=Geany
GenericName=Integrated Development Environment
Comment=A fast and lightweight IDE using GTK2
Exec=geany %F
Icon=geany
Terminal=false
Categories=GTK;Development;IDE;
2) menu-cached scans /usr/share/applications and creates one big file with all the relevant info from the desktop files. For each program, it gives one line each to the name, the icon, the categories and the comment. So, for the example above, it would have the lines

Geany
geany
GTK;Development;IDE;
A fast and lightweight IDE using GTK2

3) openbox-menu parses menu-cached's output (found in /tmp/obcache/menus), and transforms it into different openbox pipe menus. The first submenu (with all the different categories, is put into /tmp/obcache/pndmenu; the entries for each category are put into /tmp/obcache/1, /tmp/obcache/2 etc.)
---

The Community Codec Pack breaks the menu, because in its desktop file, the 'comment' entry contains 2 lines separated by a newline character ('\n'). When this gets added to menu-cached's file, the second line of the comment becomes the name of the next program, the next programs name becomes its icon, etc etc.

As a guess, I would say that when the CCP PND was created, whoever wrote the PND's description (which utimately becomes its 'comment') actually typed '\n', rather than pressing 'enter'.

---

I 'fixed' the issue with Openbox in the .next image by hacking menu-cached not to record comments. If PNDs other than the Codec Pack are causing problems, then if you post menu-cached's output file (in /tmp/obcache/menus), I'll have a look to try and figure out why.

 

[Klumpen]

I got it working now, but after two days of use, I missed the number of icons possible on the desktop with XFCE and the WLAN status icon.

Is there a way to get both into OpenBox?

 

[Gausen]

^ There is some kind of workaround for the icons. You can use the file manager (thunar) to access the desktop folder within home. The desktop folder holds all the launchers that you see on the desktop with xfce.

 

[KickAss]

switching on the wlan applet in the right click opbox menu brings back the wlan status icon in the menu bar.

 

[badcloud]

Pandora key does not bring up menu after I upgraded via Upgrade Pandora OS Application

Right click/nub, ctrl-Pandora key, and task bar pandora icon all work, just not by pressing only the pandora key

 

[Delightful Dude]

I had the same issue. Try running the openbox.pnd (installer) after the OS upgrade. My Pandora key works again!

 

[pmprog]

Is Upgrade Pandora OS even an option in .next?

 

[badcloud]

I had the same issue. Try running the openbox.pnd (installer) after the OS upgrade. My Pandora key works again!

Worked for me too

Thanks!