Openbox is a Lightweight Window Manager

Openbox is one of the more popular lightweight window managers. It can be used as a standalone solution or as a component of the LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. The default look of Openbox is rather minimalistic, but it is a good basis for building a custom desktop.


The default look of openSUSE's openbox

Fortunately, the internet is full of resources and tutorials for customizing the look and feel of Openbox. Here are some of the more informative pages I've found:

• Openbox documentation
• Openbox FAQ
• Urukrama's Openbox guide
• Openbox in Ubuntu Wiki
• HOW-TO: Install, Customize, and Configure Openbox (lots of options)
• Configuring Openbox V2
• Kmandla's Feisty Openbox on 1Ghz Pentium III, start to finish

Themes for Openbox can of course be found in the usual sources. See, for example, the following:

• Boxlook's Openbox themes
• And more links can be found in the official documentation

Can you recommend some other sites?

OpenBox on My Lightweight Linux Desktop

After a week of XFCE, I decided to change my desktop to something lighter. My new computer is equipped with a 1 GHz CPU and 256 MB RAM. It seems to be more than enough to run Xubuntu 8.04 but I wanted to have even faster desktop that I was able to get with XFCE.

So I turned of some more unnecessary services and installed OpenBox. As OpenBox does not provide a panel I installed also pypanel. It is pretty useful and customizable enough. As the desktop seemed fast enough for me, I installed Launchy that provides a fast way to start applications without need to use a mouse. Even after these additions, OpenBox is a joy to use.