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Fluxbox 1.3.6 Released

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

jones_supa writes: After nearly two years since the previous release, the Fluxbox team has released version 1.3.6 to start off the new year. Like most Linux geeks already know, Fluxbox is the long-standing X window manager derived from Blackbox. The new version (announcement) puts emphasis on quality assurance and takes care of fixing a bunch of critical bugs: clocktool problems, rendering long text, race condition on shutdown, lost keypresses after workspace switch, corruption of fbrun-history, and resize and move problems. The two new features are an ArrangeWindowsStack action and treating Windows with a WM_CLASS as DockApp as DockApps. Translations for Bulgarian, Hebrew and Japanese also got updates. The Fluxbox project sends many thanks to all the contributors.

63 comments

  1. Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I still use it on my FreeBSD box. Ancient P4 machine but fast enough for my purposes. Fluxbox is quite light.

    1. Re:Awesome by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Speaking of FreeBSD, Lumina, the new DE for PC-BSD, too is based on Fluxbox. I certainly like working w/ that.

    2. Re:Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What makes it "for PC-BSD?" Will it not run on Linux just as well?

    3. Re:Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not specifically for any BSD, i've been using Fluxbox on my Debian and Ubuntu boxes for years with few problems and fewer complaints.

    4. Re:Awesome by unixisc · · Score: 1

      I doubt it. During a Linux expo, I asked one of the PC-BSD guys who was there whether PC-BSD could support Razor-qt, and he said that Razor-qt had too many Linux dependencies on it to run on PC-BSD. So Lumina too might have some BSDisms that need to be translated to Linux before it can run on Linux. Right now, it runs only on PC-BSD and FreeBSD

    5. Re:Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Lumina Desktop Environment (Lumina for short) is a lightweight, XDG-compliant, BSD-licensed desktop environment that focuses specifically on streamlining the ability to get work done while minimizing system overhead. It is specifically designed for PC-BSD® and FreeBSD, but has also been ported to many other BSD and Linux operating systems.

      http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Lumina/10.1

  2. Congrats by by+(1706743) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Fluxbox on an old Slackware laptop got me through college. Good stuff, though I have since moved on to i3wm.

    1. Re:Congrats by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fluxbox on an old Slackware laptop got me through college. Good stuff, though I have since moved on to i3wm.

      As far as tiling WMs are concerned, I think Notion is my favourite because it's tabbed and static tiles instead of the more common dynamic tiling style. I use it on my laptop, or on my desktop inside a nested X server (xephyr) to group related programs into a single window. Especially useful for coding, with multiple files and terms open and the infrequently-used ones in smaller windows or in tabs that I switch to when needed.

    2. Re:Congrats by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Almost the same for me. Started with Slack + Flux than changed a lot of distros but on all of them I was using Fluxbox .
      Just few months ago dropped it for i3 .

    3. Re:Congrats by Vyse+of+Arcadia · · Score: 1

      I've seen a lot of love for i3wm, so riddle me this: what user-visible advantages does it have over other tiling window managers? I just keep finding stuff about how nice the code is.

    4. Re:Congrats by by+(1706743) · · Score: 1

      I actually haven't played around with too many tiling wms -- I used dwm for awhile, but that is somewhat limited. I switched to i3 and it just does everything I need it to do -- very simple, great multi-monitor support, and I can tile/arrange things pretty much exactly the way I want. That said, I'm sure there are other great tiling wms that would do exactly what I want, too =)

  3. Wayland / serious question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    What will happen to alternative window managers like Fluxbox once Wayland starts replacing X? (and I suppose other things like Mir as well as Wayland)

    1. Re:Wayland / serious question by An0nymous+Coward · · Score: 2

      That will happen when it's the year of the Linux desktop.

    2. Re: Wayland / serious question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What makes you think those projects will replace X?

    3. Re:Wayland / serious question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I put the question this way: when will Fluxbox get Wayland support?

    4. Re:Wayland / serious question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You might as well ask when is fluxbox going to depend on systemd. This is a pure window manager, the kind of users that it attracts care not for such things.

    5. Re:Wayland / serious question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      http://www.maui-project.org/ - this is the only Wayland WM at the moment and honestly Wayland for the most part handles like 90% of this stuff on it's own. The real thing is that most likely it'll happen many years from now when Wayland actually "happens".

    6. Re:Wayland / serious question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      window managers that actually enable work to get done have no need for gayland.

    7. Re:Wayland / serious question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pretty sure the Enlightenment system I am running now is on Wayland. GNOMEs Mutter also supports it but I have no idea how well

    8. Re:Wayland / serious question by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Wayland is just like X. A framework to build gui stuff on. It is X compatible too and supports the protocol.

      What is the big deal?

      Infact I remember something called the Unix Haters Manual which has a large section about X. I remember X back in 1998. It is a POS! It took 70% of the ram in my system.

      You all hate it and think it is GOD because you are reading this on an i5 with gigs of ram. But trust me no openGl, true type fonts, 100% of all ram in a 8 meg system, wrong XFree86.conf file meant fried monitors, etc. I am in favor of gutting it but I know after the hate with SystemD Slashdot has become the ultraconservative place even if it has nothing to do with it.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    9. Re:Wayland / serious question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You will have to run them inside Xorg running on top of Wayland, which will remove any benefits that Wayland brings.

    10. Re:Wayland / serious question by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Wayland is just like X. A framework to build gui stuff on. It is X compatible too and supports the protocol.

      No, it isn't compatible with X, no more than Windows or OXS is compatible with X (both can run an X server).

      Wayland's view of the world is essentially a bunch of surfaces, collections of which belong to programs. a program can draw updates to the surface then inform Wayland that the drawing updates are done.

      The wayland compositor is on the other end and decids how to draw the surfaces to the screen (or whatever). It also distributes input events to the various surfaces.

      For X on the other hand, the server owns the surfaces and is responsible for drawing them. Typically, a window manager arranges them on the screen and allows them to be moved around (though X can run without a WM).

      You can rnu X on top of a Wayland compositor. the server manages windows as surfaces then hands them to Wayland to draw. There's no theoretical reason that the Wayland compositor couldn't then hand any surfaces not already managed by X straight back to X. Then an X11 window manages could be used on Wayland. In other words, the compositor could only draw to the screen durfaces from the X server and then route any others through the X server first.

      There'd probably be problems with dnd or copy and paste of anything other than text due to the way the protocols differ. Those things could hypothetically be fixed as well: thost protocols on X are surprisingly sane and pleasant.

      [outdated rant about x]

      If you think X ran slowly on an old machine, try running ANY piece of software on it. I guarantee X worked better then than any modern program you run and enjoy now ever would have.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    11. Re:Wayland / serious question by DrXym · · Score: 1

      The need for a window manager doesn't go away because of Wayland. Wayland provides a reference implementation of a compositing window manager called Weston but its likely that others will appear. The role is somewhat different since windows are decorated client side but a wm would still provide functionality such as drag & drop, resize, maximize / minimize, snapping them to edges, animation / effects, remote access etc.

    12. Re:Wayland / serious question by DrXym · · Score: 1

      It is X compatible too and supports the protocol.

      Wayland is an API for creating / destroy / rendering windows as graphical surfaces and handling input events. Wayland is implemented by a compositor, e.g. Weston. Neither Wayland nor Weston gives a damn about X in any way shape or form. If you want to run X apps then you'd run the Xwayland server which uses wayland as its backend and hosts clients through X11 protocol. I expect most dists that switch to wayland would seamlessly fire up the server if its needed although over time more and more applications will be ported and work without it.

    13. Re:Wayland / serious question by macsuibhne · · Score: 1

      The Unix Haters Handbook is online: http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/ww...

      --
      -- "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" -- Juvenal
    14. Re:Wayland / serious question by dbIII · · Score: 1

      The most alternative of them, Enlightenment, now has a better Wayland compositor than the Wayland project has - which sadly didn't stop Daniel Stone making fun of the earlier e16 in his Wayland presentations just like he makes fun of X where a lot of the Wayland code is borrowed from. So all Wayland needs now is some applications and some people who want to use them. They have no excuses since others are giving them a lot of help.
      If Wayland takes off then fluxbox etc may follow with support for it, and since Wayland is designed to hopefully do one simple task well it probably won't be too hard for fluxbox to render to it.
      Thankfully the fully monolithic (and stupid) idea originally pushed of having only one compositor, one window manager, one etc etc has been abandoned so it's turning into something cross-platform, flexible and potentially of future use. However I see it as likely to be "as well as" X instead of rendering X extinct because it has different goals and a different niche. Daniel Stone wants it for phones, make sense. Other people want it for single user desktops where all remote access is via web browsers etc, makes sense. It doesn't make sense in a workstation environment which is why X has been in various offices for close to two decades, but that's not a niche that is being aimed for and X isn't going extinct there any time soon. To fill that niche Wayland would have to be far too much like X and the simple model wouldn't fit anymore - it can't stay single user and non-network aware like a MSDOS framebuffer in such an environment and be useful - so it's a choice of lean and potentially fast some day versus a tool that does everything.

    15. Re:Wayland / serious question by dbIII · · Score: 1

      No. E18 and e19 have support for Wayland once that project catches up. For now it's running on X.

    16. Re:Wayland / serious question by dbIII · · Score: 1

      It is a POS! It took 70% of the ram in my system.

      You've forgotten that "top" reported 100% of the memory in the video cards as used by X and then added that to what X was using onboard.
      It was amusing in machines with large video cards when it reported that X was using more memory than was on the motherboard.

    17. Re:Wayland / serious question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That will happen when it's the year of the Linux desktop.

      So at least 50 years after I'm dead then.

    18. Re:Wayland / serious question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You might as well ask when is fluxbox going to depend on systemd. This is a pure window manager, the kind of users that it attracts care not for such things.

      Which means they must be working hard on "systemd.fluxbox", because systemd must encompass everything, even if the users care not for such things.

    19. Re:Wayland / serious question by jbolden · · Score: 1

      Wayland doesn't have window managers in quite the same sense they will be totally incompatible (excluding the X11 layer that runs on top of Wayland). However there is nothing to stop there from being multiple flavors of window management under Wayland. So there will be a generational shift.

    20. Re:Wayland / serious question by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      How does the client decide how to do the decorations? Does that mean you'll see a KDE application use a KDE theme with minimize/maximize/close buttons, and a GTK3 application will have a Gnome-like theme with only the close button and not "minimize"?

  4. works well enough by X0563511 · · Score: 2

    I've got it on my server. When you absolutely need a display (rarely) fluxbox inside a VNC server does the job and stays out of the way.

    --
    For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    1. Re:works well enough by turbidostato · · Score: 1

      "I've got it on my server. When you absolutely need a display"

      Can you please point out some examples of these needs?

    2. Re:works well enough by MikeBabcock · · Score: 4, Informative

      You have a remote APC UPS and you need to configure some obscure option through their stupid GUI application (and can't find the serial protocol reference).
      You want to configure a remote printer that has a JAVA interface that's slow and won't properly load over a port forward.
      You have an X app you normally just forward through SSH but you're on a terrible connection and don't want the app to keep getting killed by reconnecting.
      You want to verify how the Intranet page loads locally to the user without taking over someone's desktop.
      Some asinine printer driver comes with a GUI installer and you just really need to get through it once.

      --
      - Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
    3. Re:works well enough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've used it on and old laptop that didn't pack a punch anymore but was still quite useful as a backup computer. Nowadays I use it on servers too when it's absolutely necessary to have use a GUI on certain programs. Works like a charm as it's very light and configurable.

    4. Re:works well enough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You want to verify how the Intranet page loads locally to the user without taking over someone's desktop.

      ssh port forwarding, esp dynamic port forwarding is really good for this. ssh -D makes a socks proxy on localhost that you can point your local browser to.

    5. Re:works well enough by X0563511 · · Score: 1

      Sure, when you're running VMs and those VMs don't have SSH or serial consoles configured yet. The RDP server for virtualbox for example is not available unless you install Oracle's proprietary extensions.

      So, I'll SSH in, start vnc, start my client, and connect via SSH tunnel. Fire up virtualbox, play around on the console until SSH can do the job.

      (If I had a choice I'd have just put ESX on the host, but it's not an option. Even if it was, it would have to be one of those custom ISOs since it isn't officially supported hardware.)

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    6. Re:works well enough by MikeBabcock · · Score: 1

      You do realize that (sadly) VNC over a port forward is both more stable and faster than most SSH X11 forwards.

      --
      - Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
  5. Fluxbox is the best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Fluxbox runs on my EeePC with OpenBSD. I can't imagine needing GNOME or KDE. Fluxbox does everything I need, and stays out of the way. It's simple flexibility, perfected. Kudos!

    1. Re:Fluxbox is the best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I stopped using it (and Blackbox) because at some point (a few years back) something broke where if you push a window to the back, the new window on top doesn't get focus - the focus stays with the window you just pushed back. Then, when you start typing, you end up typing in the window on the bottom of all the other windows wondering why your text isn't showing up. It is completely different from how windows are supposed to behave under X and very frustrating to use after 20+ years of muscle memory (you have to push the window back and *then* click in the window on top to give it focus). I switched to OpenBox which seems to work correctly (mostly). I'll have to give the new version of Fluxbox a try and see if this has been fixed.

  6. almost a coherent sentence... by mjm1231 · · Score: 1

    "treating Windows with a WM_CLASS as DockApp as DockApps."

    Well, if it walks like a DockApp and talks like DockApp, it's probably a DockApp.

    P.S. - I like words better when they actually say things.

    --
    Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
  7. "As" Does not Always Equal "Like" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Like most Linux geeks already know" != "As most Linux geeks already know." "As you know" is an interjection with as serving as a synonym for "a fact which", which cannot be simply replaced with "like."

    1. Re:"As" Does not Always Equal "Like" by martin-boundary · · Score: 1
      Like, maybe it's(*) just missing a comma?

      (*)The sentence, stupid!

  8. Year of the Linux Desktop?!? by apparently · · Score: 0

    After nearly two years since the previous release, the Fluxbox team has released version 1.3.6 to start off the new year. Like most Linux geeks already know, Fluxbox is the long-standing X window manager derived from Blackbox. The new version (announcement) puts emphasis on quality assurance and takes care of fixing a bunch of critical bugs: clocktool problems, rendering long text, race condition on shutdown, lost keypresses after workspace switch, corruption of fbrun-history, and resize and move problems.

    It only took two years for the open source community to implement these fixes, meanwhile Team M$FT is still trying to figure out how to optimize their HOSTS files like a bunch of n11bs.

    1. Re:Year of the Linux Desktop?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And yet they've had resizing, moving and rendering long text working for about 25 years...

    2. Re:Year of the Linux Desktop?!? by civilizedINTENSITY · · Score: 1

      That is about the break point between windows 2.0 and windows 3.0, with only the later doing "windows" as is commonly meant today. Windows 2 could only tile.

    3. Re:Year of the Linux Desktop?!? by fnj · · Score: 1

      That is about the break point between windows 2.0 and windows 3.0, with only the later doing "windows" as is commonly meant today. Windows 2 could only tile.

      I can clearly remember using 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 3.1.

      It was 1.0 which couldn't overlap windows; only tile. 2.0 could overlap, and pretty much worked visually as we would expect a windowing manager to work today. 3.0 introduced 286 protected mode support, and could to some limited extent benefit even more from 386, but did not yet support the miracle of 386 protected mode.

      1.0 was basically nothing more than a clever toy, but compared with text-mode DOS it did allow the stunning breakthrough of graphical mode Word and Excel. The problem with 2.0 was terrible memory limitations, not fully lifted until 3.1.

    4. Re:Year of the Linux Desktop?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "optimize their HOSTS files"

      Shhhhhhhhhh, APK will hear you and start spamming this thread!

  9. FVWM95 FTW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    fluxbox is for the linux bourgeois.

    1. Re:FVWM95 FTW by epyT-R · · Score: 1

      then who is kde and gnome 3 for?

    2. Re:FVWM95 FTW by twistedcubic · · Score: 2

      The proles, apparently.

  10. I know what it is by Osgeld · · Score: 2, Insightful

    but the description of it in this summary is pointless

      "Like most Linux geeks already know, Fluxbox is the long-standing X window manager derived from Blackbox"

    lets say I am not a linux geek, I have linux but its ubuntu or min and whatever ships with that is all I know as far as desktops go? what is fluxbox? oh its derived from blackbox, gee fucking thanks for that useful bit of info, so why even have it in there?

    1. Re:I know what it is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You Ubantu mouthbreathers always want to be spoonfed.

    2. Re:I know what it is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The summary called it a 'window manager' which is, well, an accurate description. I just wish more people knew what window managers were, so they could perhaps stop using metacity and kwin and compiz and instead be enlightened and find a real window manager.

  11. Whoa where is my cell phone UI? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    All these things are sooo 20th century. It is skuemorphic and uses real world objects and menus to display things. Oh bad bad bro from my art professor.

    I want my cell phone interface. It needs to be all white and flat and only 1 app at a time man. I just can't handle this and XP. It makes me wanna cry as computers really are not calculators that do all these complicated things. They are an appliance!

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  12. This is not freshmeat/freecode by technosaurus · · Score: 1

    If Dice wanted to track releases, they should have kept freshmeat viable. ... I guess they are missing that traffic now that we have freshcode.club.
    Pretty soon this site will just be randomly AI-selected tech news feeds and commenting will be disabled to reduce maintenance cost.

  13. slow-clap by dingleberrie · · Score: 1

    What a well-written summary.
    It told me what Fluxbox was, why it was important, why this announcement was important, and didn't make me feel stupid for not knowing about it already (since I'm not a linux geek). I'd wish more announcements would follow this pattern.

  14. two years with a "bunch of critial bugs" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    sounds like that open source model where bugs get fixed quickly is hard at work.

  15. Thankless work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm always impressed by the open source community's willingness to focus on the drudgery bug cleanup. Thank you!

  16. I know what it is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You know site is 'News for Nerds'. You have to have a valid Nerd card, to understand the goings around here.

  17. still good for me by jmccue · · Score: 1

    Big thanks to the developers. I find it very useful no matter how powerful the system (including very modern systems). Though nice, KDE and GNOME are too complex for me.