2025: A solitary screenshot
September 25, 2025
I’m still running Openbox without a desktop environment, on Debian Testing. I’m still using the Erthe Gtk and Openbox themes (for many years now). The desktop picture is of two birds flying past the painted hull of a ship. I can’t recall where I got it from.
The panel is tint2. This is a recent change. Until recently, I have not used a panel in several years, but used Openbox’s dock to hold a system tray and a clock (tdc). I’ll probably switch back to that in due course, but tint2 is nice for now.
Around the time when I first started using Linux full time — Ubuntu Breezy Badger was my first installation — someone posted a screenshot of their desktop on the ubuntuforums. As I recall, that person was running ctwm as his window manager and said he had not changed his setup in years. It all looked so very dated to me, and I wondered why anyone would want to use such an old window manager when there were so many others, and better looking ones, available.
I suppose I have now become like that person. For years, I’ve just copied over all my configuration files with each new install, with each new laptop, and reinstalled Openbox, the window manager I love most. I’ve not looked at Gnome or KDE in years, and have no idea if anything new has arrived on the scene. I also have less and less interest in finding out. Perhaps to others my desktop now looks dated. But Openbox does all that I need. And I understand it now: why change what works for you?
Maximise and undecorate (and back) in Openbox
September 24, 2025
I wanted to find a way to automatically remove the window decorations when a window was maximised (in Openbox), and, when it was restored to its original size, to automatically add its window decorations again.
The main reason for this is that I wanted to have a clock that is always visible without having to sacrifice screen space for a dock or a panel. I’m using the tint2 panel, with a height of slightly less than my standard Openbox window decorations, and a very minimal configuration: it only shows the desktop name, a taskbar which only shows the active window and nothing else, and a clock. (Openbox’s own dock holds a system tray, which autohides, so I only see it when I need it, which is rarely.)
I rarely use the window buttons (close, maximise, minimise, etc.), since I control most aspects of my desktop with the keyboard rather than the mouse, so I was happy to sacrifice those.
I’ve only recently discovered that Openbox has a conditional action, “if”. You can tell it that if any number of things are the case, then Openbox should do X, but if they are not Openbox should do Y (X and Y being any number of actions).
Here is the relevant part of my rc.xml. (All my Openbox window management actions are tied to the keychain W-a. W-a-m is used for maximising.)
<keybind key="W-a">
...
<keybind key="m">
<action name="if">
<decor>yes</decor>
<maximized>no</maximized>
<then>
<action name="MaximizeFull"/>
<action name="Undecorate"/>
</then>
<else>
<action name="UnmaximizeFull"/>
<action name="Decorate"/>
</else>
</action>
</keybind>
...
</keybind>
A pop-up dictionary with sdcv
September 17, 2025
For years I’ve used StarDict, but it seems to have been abandoned, and not everything works as well as it used to (I can’t set a custom font anymore, for example). There are some alternatives (like qstardict, goldendict), but all have something I dislike enough not to switch to them.
In the past, I’ve occasionally used sdcv, a command-line application that lets you search stardic dictionaries. I’ve recently switched to this exclusively, and found a way to use it that makes it far superior to all the others, including the original StarDict.
The dictionary window is only necessary when you need to look something up. StarDict and its ilk have a “scan” feature, that lets you look up any word you’ve highlighted. I tried that feature several times, but also found it clunky to use (especially since I mostly use StarDict for Sanskrit dictionaries, and since Sanskrit declines its nouns and conjugates its verbs, you almost never want to look up the word that is in the text you are reading).
With sdcv I can do this much better. Here’s how:
I created a script that uses zenity in which I can type the word I want to look up, and then launches a terminal to display the entry in sdcv. That script is then tied to a keybinding in my Openbox rc.xml (W-s), so I can look up something almost instantly.
This is the script:
!/bin/sh
# Use zenity to search for words in sdcv
SANSKRIT=zenity --entry --title="Look up"
\ --text="What should I look up?"
urxvt --geometry 75x45 -e sh -c "sdcv '$SANSKRIT' | less"If you use xterm, that last line could just be xterm -e "sdcv $SANSKRIT | less" (i.e. without invoking sh), but that does not work with my terminal of choice, urxvt, for reasons I don’t quite comprehend.
Unlike many other cli applications, sdcv doesn’t quite launch properly when you don’t run it in an already open terminal (urxvt -e sdcv launches sdcv and then terminates it immediately). So you need to use less to view the result of your search.
Obviously, this doesn’t work when you are not sure what you are looking for: you don’t get a list of possible options. It requires you to know what word in the dictionary you want to see. If that is not the case, you’ll need to launch sdcv normally, in an open terminal.
This doesn’t bother me, since this method suits my needs 96.5% of the time, and has the benefit that 1) looking something up is so much faster now, and 2) I don’t need to have an extra window open; I can call up a dictionary whenever I need it, and when I don’t doesn’t need to run in the background.
“Could not find the ipod firewire id”
July 6, 2024
I tried to manage an iPod classic 6th generation with gtkpod on Debian Testing, but gtkpod gave me the following error message:
Could not find the ipod firewire id
I searched online and found various suggestions on how to remedy this. Only one of these worked for me. The Arch Linux wiki suggests to do the following:
Mount the iPod.
Find the iPod’s serial number, using the following command:
lsusb -v | grep -i Serial
This gives you a 16 character string (e.g. 00A1234567891231). Actually, this command gave me several strings, but only one had 16 characters. All of them were preceded by a single number (e.g. “3 00A1234567891231“); you do not need that separated single digit, just the 16 character string.
On the mounted iPod, go to the directory iPod_control/Devices. In that directory there should be a file called SysInfo (create it if it doesn’t exist). Add the following line to that file, using the text editor of your choice:
FirewireGuid: 0xffffffffffffffff
(Replace ffffffffffffffff with the 16 character string you obtained with lsusb, and make sure you add 0x to it, at the beginning).
That’s all I had to do, for gtkpod to recognise the iPod and to be able to transfer files to the device.
Screenshots of Times Past
March 29, 2020
Looking at some unpublished posts, I realised there were a few screenshots I never posted. Several of these are of window managers I have not used in a very long time (windowlab and sithwm) and never used for very long, and all of these are from at least 4 years ago.
But since this site still seems to get some significant amount of traffic, despite being mostly inactive for five years, and since everyone likes screenshots, here are some brief glimpses into the past.
Windowlab, with an unreleased Gtk theme, and the Children of the Earth icon theme.
Windowlab, with a the Alghattas Gtk theme and the MeliaeSVG icon theme.
Openbox 3.5.2, with the Laza-mod Openbox and Gtk theme, the ACYL icons, and a wallpaper that started out as a picture of a brick wall.
–Openbox 3.5.2, with the Amaravati Gtk and Openbox theme, and ACYL icon theme. (Inspired by this theme.)
Using bitmapped fonts (like artwiz) in Debian
January 4, 2016
I understand little of the complexity surrounding fonts in Debian (and most other Linux distributions). But I do know that to get the artwiz fonts (or other bitmapped fonts) properly installed has been challenging as the procedures to install fonts occasionally changed, and good documentation is hard to find. In 2008 I explained how to install the artwiz fonts in Ubuntu Hardy, but those guidelines have not worked for many years.
Which is a shame, because the artwiz fonts are wonderfully minimalistic. Here are a few examples:
I had given up on installing these fonts a long time ago, but recently decided to give this another try. After a good amount of searching, I found a way that seems to work, at least on this system, running Debian Testing. I suppose that this should work also on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or other Debian derivatives (please confirm this in the comments, if this is indeed the case!).
Here is what you have to do. First, download the artwiz fonts. (There are also version that support characters used in German and Swedish here; if you download those files, change the commands below where necessary.)
Unpack the bz2 archive:
tar xvjf artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3.tar.bz2
Move into the new directory:
cd artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3
Inside that directory you have all the .pcf font files. Before, those were the files that you would use, but apparently Debian no longer recognises .pcf font files, only .pcf.gz files. Therefore, you have to archive these with the following command:
gzip *.pcf
Now copy the entire artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3 directory to /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc, with root privileges. If you use Ubuntu, add sudo before each command, as Ubuntu does not use root (su).
su
mv artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3 /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc
Move into that last directory, and create an index of the font files that X will be able to use, still with root privileges:
su
cd /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc
mkfontdir
mkfontscale
By default Debian disables bitmapped fonts. Check whether there is a link to a file called 70-no-bitmaps.conf in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ directory. If there is, delete it.
Renew your font cache, as root (su or sudo):
fc-cache -f -v
Then enable the use of bitmapped fonts, as root:
dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
You will be asked to answer three questions. These are the choices I selected:
Then reconfigure your fontconfig settings, also as root:
dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
Then, add the following line to ~/.xprofile (or ~/.xinitrc if you use startx), so you can use the fonts in X applications (like xterm, and xfontsel, but also dmenu):
xset fp+ "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3/" &
(According to this post from 2013, you should also be able to add this to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/, but that did not work for me.)
Once all this is done, you should be able to use the artwiz fonts in any X application. To prove that this does indeed work, here is a screenshot of xfontsel, selecting the nu font, and using nu as the font in Openbox.
To use these fonts in conky, I use ${font nu:size=7} in .conkyrc just before the command or text conky should display. Thus, ${font nu:size=7}${time %H:%M} gives the following:
2015: The year in screenshots
January 2, 2016
These are screenshots of the desktops I have used in 2015. No dramatic changes–still using Openbox, still loving the Erthe theme for work, still keeping it simple.
Early in the year I replaced Varuna, a Thinkpad X60 that was prone to overheat, with Soma, a Thinkpad X200. The screenshots of both are of a 23″ screen I use with it. Savitar is my old, battered, but beloved Thinkpad X41. On Soma, I’ve mainly used the last two desktops. The two screenshots of Savitar are those from last year, as I did not change anything to that desktop the entire year. Savitar is still my work laptop.
Varuna
Openbox 3.5.2, with the Mythos Gtk and Openbox themes, and the AnyColorYouLike (ACYL) icon theme.
Soma
Openbox 3.5.2, with the Alghattas Gtk and Openbox themes, and the MeliaeSVG icon theme. I can’t remember where I found the wallpaper image.
Openbox 3.5.2, with the Alghattas Gtk and Openbox themes, and the MeliaeSVG icon theme.
Openbox 3.5.2, with an unreleased Gtk and Openbox themes, and the ACYL icon theme. The wallpaper is from here (G3, scaling the 960×800 image with Feh).
Savitar
Gnome 2.30.2 with Openbox 3.5.0, still using the Erthe themes and ACYL icon theme.
PulseAudio command line control with pulseaudio-ctl
January 2, 2016
I’ve long controlled the sound volume with keybindings in Openbox, but now that PulseAudio has become default, I keep forgetting how to do so with this new sound server. You’ll find a variety of suggestions on how to control PulseAudio from the command line online, but most of them don’t work for me.
I’ve found this to be the easiest way to control PulseAudio from the command line, using pulseaudio-ctl.
Volume up:
/usr/bin/pulseaudio-ctl up
Volume down:
/usr/bin/pulseaudio-ctl down
Mute:
/usr/bin/pulseaudio-ctl mute-input
The default of the “up” and “down” commands is 5%. You can specify a different percentage. For example, if you want to increase the volume by 10%, use the following command:
/usr/bin/pulseaudio-ctl up 10
You can also set the volume at a certain percentage. If you want to set the volume at 50%, use the following command:
/usr/bin/pulseaudio-ctl set 50
Or you can set the volume at 50%, if it is currently higher than that with this command:
/usr/bin/pulseaudio-ctl atmost 50
For more options, read pulseaudio-ctl’s documentation.
2014: The year in screenshots
January 6, 2015
These are the very few screenshots I took in 2014. I change my desktop much less frequently than I used to when I started documenting this, seven years ago, but it still serves as a good index of my thoughts and moods of the past year.
Savitar is a Thinkpad X41, running Debian Testing, with Openbox and Gnome 2.30 (still!). It is the computer I use for most of my work, and its looks have changed very little since 2012. Varuna is a Thinkpad X60, with an external monitor, running Linux Mint Debian edition. I generally use Openbox on it (with several Xfce components) and occasionally Pekwm. The second desktop setup, with the Groove themes, is the one I used for most of 2014.
Varuna
Openbox 3.5, with the Laza-mod themes.
Openbox 3.5, with the Groove themes, and the ported AestheticGroove icon theme.
Pekwm 0.1.17, with the Fawn Gtk and Pekwm theme, and the Children of the Earth icon theme.
Savitar
Gnome 2.30.2 with Openbox 3.5.0, still using the Erthe themes and ACYL icon theme.
Why doesn’t Thunar use your icon theme’s folder icons?
December 10, 2014
You change your icon theme and find that Thunar uses the stock Gnome icons for directories, like in this image:
Other file managers–Nautilus, Caja, PCManFM–use your theme’s folder icons, but Thunar refuses to obey. The official Xfce documentation gives you a few workarounds, but you quickly realise these are outdated and don’t have any effect.
How do you fix this?
For some reason, Thunar looks for an inode-directory icon for folder icons. Older themes often don’t have this icon, but you can easily create it as a symbolic link. Here is how you do that:
ln -s ~/.icons/my-icon-theme/scalable/places/folder.png ~/.icons/my-icon-theme/scalable/places/inode-directory.png
Adjust this command to your needs. Make sure you replace my-icon-theme with the name of your icon theme (for icon themes installed as root, look for them in /usr/share/icons/my-icon-theme). Also double check what file type your icons are. Many icon themes use .svg files (scalable vector graphics), instead of .png files (portable network graphics) as in the above example.
Once that is done, relaunch Thunar, and your directories will use the folder icons of your chosen theme.
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