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Posted On December 22, 2011
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Written By Masen Marshall
If you’re using KDE, GNOME, XFCE or any other full desktop environment you probably have a right-click “set as background” option that handles this for you. However if you’re on Fluxbox, DWM, AwesomeWM, TWM or another lightweight window manager this tip might be helpful for you.
The command we’ll use is the fluxbox wallpaper command fbsetbg, it should work across almost all other window managers however.
Usage is simple:
fbsetbg mywallpapername.jpg
However that wallpaper won’t survive a reboot and you’ll be back with a blank screen the next time you need to power down. To make it permanent we can use fbsetbg -l (which automatically sets the last wallpaper set with the command) in our ~/.xinitrc.
So for example a minimal .xinitrc to launch fluxbox with our wallpaper could look like:
exec fbsetbg -l &
exec fluxbox
It’s simple but elegant. Since the last wallpaper set will always be restored on the start of X you’re free to change it as much as you want without updating anything.
There are several other cool things you can do with fbsetbg covered in it’s help output and man pages. Go forth and experiment!
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Posted On November 5, 2011
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Written By Masen Marshall
If you’re a Slackware user chances are you aren’t using gnome, and if you’re anything like me you might even be using a minimal window manager like Fluxbox. If the above assumptions are correct you’ve probably realized just how awful all of your GTK2 apps look ( think pidgin, claws-mail, libre-office, thunderbird, firefox, etc ).
Once upon a time I handled this problem by setting environmental variables to GTK theme files but I knew there had to be a better way.
The Better Way
The better way comes in the form of a small app called gtk-chtheme, which can be installed via slackbuild.
First go grab both the source and the slackbuild archive over at the Slackbuilds page.
Then we’ll build and install like any other Slackbuild:
tar -xvf gtk-chtheme.tar.gz
mv gtk-chtheme-* gtk-chtheme
cd gtk-chtheme
./gtk-chtheme.Slackbuild
installpkg /tmp/gtk-chtheme-*.tgz
Once installed you can run the command from the terminal to see a listing of current themes, most of which are XFCE related. I personally was looking for more choice in dark themes so I jumped over to GNOME Art and picked a few that I liked. After downloading a theme just untar it and move it over to /usr/share/themes/ and it will automatically show up in gtk-chtheme.
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Posted On November 4, 2011
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Written By Masen Marshall
I’m a big Spotify fan, I have a paid account over there and enjoy the service. One minor annoyance however has been running the client on my machine. I did run it in wine for a small period of time but eventually switched entirely to using it on Android. This morning I got fed up with that and decided to get the native beta working on my Slackware 13.37 laptop.
The Install
First we’re going to jump over onto the repo and grab the .deb binary for the beta:
wget http://repository.spotify.com/pool/non-free/s/spotify/spotify-client-qt_0.6.2.291.gcccc1f5.116-1_i386.deb
Now we’ll extract the files from that deb with the ar command:
ar vx spotify-client-qt_0.6.2.291.gcccc1f5.116-1_i386.deb
Now you should see a file named data.tar.gz, this contains everything we’re interested in, lets extract that:
tar -xzvf data.tar.gz
Now all we need to do is move the binary and theme files to the correct locations on the system:
cp bin/spotify /usr/bin/ cp -R share/spotify /usr/share
Yes we could just copy the entire directory to /usr, but we don’t need everything in there, this keeps it more clean.
That’s it, really, now just run the spotify command:
spotify
You’re good to go. You’ll probably notice a couple of dependency errors on the execution of the command but nothing that will stop it from launching. Enjoy.