Help:Using Openbox in GNOME

Revision as of 15:36, 7 June 2007

Starting Openbox with GNOME

Figure 1: The GNOME/Openbox option when logging in

To log into the GNOME desktop environment with Openbox as your window manager, select the "GNOME/Openbox" option when logging in through GDM, which you can see in Figure 1.

If you don't use a graphical log in, you can use the openbox-gnome-session command to start a GNOME session with Openbox as your window manager.

See the getting started guide for more details.

Accessing gnome-panel with key bindings

Figure 2: The gnome-panel main menu

If you are using gnome-panel in Openbox and want to access it with key bindings, you can use the gnome-panel-control program (which is a part of Openbox) to do so.

Here is an example of two bindings to pop up the gnome-panel's main menu, and to pop up the "Run" dialog:

<keybind key="A-F1">
    <action name="execute"><execute>gnome-panel-control --main-menu</execute></action>
</keybind>
<keybind key="A-F2">
    <action name="execute"><execute>gnome-panel-control --run-dialog</execute></action>
</keybind>

Just add that to the <keyboard> section of your rc.xml configuration file, and change the keys to match your preferences. The keys shown are the defaults used by Metacity, the default window manager for GNOME.

Logging out

Figure 3: The GNOME logout screen, shown with gnome-session-save

In order to log out of GNOME without going through the gnome-panel, you can use the command gnome-session-save --kill --gui.

Here is an example of a "Log out" option for a menu:

<menu id="root-menu">
  ...
  <item label="Log out">
    <action name="Execute"><execute>gnome-session-save --kill --gui</execute></action>
  </item>
</menu>

You can also use the same command in a key binding to log out by pressing a key combination.