A bunch of questions to help me switch

[Ceno]

Hi,

I've always wanted to switch to lxde, but some stuff just won't work out of the box so I kept postponing it. Now I have the time to try and hack around on this thing, but I've been failing miserably lol.

1-I'm able to run compiz fusion with the compiz icon thing. Is this absolutely necessary? I don't need the ability to choose which window manager I want, I just want the effects. If it's necessary to run the icon, how do I default compiz-fusion to be on? I put the icon in the autostart folder, it's running on login, put then I have to chose compiz as the window manager to turn it on.
1.1-Still on compiz fusion, Is it possible to run openbox while running compiz fusion? The icon defaulted me to metacity, Ideally i'd like to use openbox since it's lighter.
2-Programs like gnome-do and avant-window-navigator launch stuff. To launch them, instead of calling programs directly they call programs like xdg-open .How can I configure these to use PCManFM instead of Nautilus? Since nautilus isn't running, the attempts to launch just fail. On this bug report https://answers.launchpad.net/do/+question/34349 the guy is able to do it, but doesn't explain how.
3-PCManFM has difficulty mounting partitions I have on disk. The error itself isn't grand http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/167159/pcmanfm.png . Should PCManFM be able to do this or should I add the partitions to fstab(I think)?
4-Since I'm writing this... i've been using dropbox to syncronize files between my laptop and my netbook. Dropbox only supports nautilus so won't work on lxde. Anyone know anything that would work?

Any answer would be great, thx for reading! I'll publish these on my blog and hopefully people with the same problems will find the solutions googling.

[archibald haddock]

I never used compiz-fusion, but maybe you could open the Icon (I think you mean a *.desktop file?) and change the command. Maybe compiz-fusion has some parameters to configure. man compiz-fusion should show some.

For opening, just edit ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list to your wants or use xdg-mime(see man file).

Could we have some more info about the partition layout (fdisk -l) and your fstab (cat /etc/fstab)?

I am using subversion for syncing my PCs, because mainly textfiles are swaped allover. Plain FTP would be an option, to.

[Ceno]

Thx for the reply.

By checking the man I saw that starting the compiz fusion icon with the -f option forces the activation of compiz. So altering the .desktop file in the autostart folder so that it executes "fusion-icon -f" solves the issue. Nice : -)

Using xdg-mime seems a bit more complicated. I do believe that launchers of say, folders, use something like "file:///" but I'm not sure. Anyway, changing the mime type associations will affect my gnome session as well won't it? Ideally I'd like to make alterations that would only be valid in lxde. I can see a scheme of running a bash script on logon that would change them and then do the inverse on logout, but it seems like a hell of a job.

At the moment I have 3 partitions, one for XP, one for ubuntu studio and another for regular Ubuntu. fstab says

Code: Select all

UUID=226d3d99-7b4f-4996-8775-4def4b2e8c1a /               ext3    relatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

and fdisk -l for some unholy reason gives

Code: Select all

Cannot open /dev/sda
Cannot open /dev/sdb

Since I still don't know which of one the Ubuntus I'm gonna keep, the better way to do this is add whatever partitions I want to fstab and have them mounted on boot. My only issue is that nautilus can handle this nicely, and PCmanFM... not so nicely.

By plain ftp you mean setting up an ftp server and then sync both pcs using it? Jesus, that's way too much lol. Anyway, I found this guide http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic ... box-howto/ and it seems that someone got it to work with PCman so I'll have to check it out later. Thx for the input anyway : -)

[archibald haddock]

At my knowledge LXDE tries to keep close to the FreeDesktop Specifications, so changing ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list would affect LXDE and probably GNOME (try it ).

But having two files and letting LXDE switching them should not be that hard.

There are the files /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart and /usr/bin/lxde-logout for startup and logout.
In /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart we could add:
/PATH/configfile_lxde > /home/USER/.local/share/applications/defaults.list
In /usr/bin/lxde-logout we could add:
/PATH/configfile_gnome > /home/USER/.local/share/applications/defaults.list

This should theoretically work. Maybe their are ways for adding this to user session config files in some ~ file, but for that ask another person.


It seems you have some problem on your pc, if fdisk -l is giving that errors. I don't know if this is a LXDE error or some Gnome/Nautilius magic, that it works.
What is saying fdisk -l just after booting up, before starting an X session?

[Ceno]

With the autostart thing, I was able to put "compiz" running and so I no longer need to use the compiz fusion-icon. nice!

Ok the problem with the defaults.lst for me is that it's populated with barely readable stuff from Crossover. Confusing, to say the least. But still, I'd have to write it by hand? O_o For the record, avant-window-navigator I believe does use xdg-open to launch stuff. Some other thing maybe... I'll have to investigate this.
Anyway, you're solution for changing the associated config files on login and logout is simple and straightforward. Maybe it'll come to that...

I have no idea why fdisk -l does not work. But anyway, the error pcmanfm was giving me, the one with the screenshot I was initially complaining about, was actually farely simple. It needs root permissions to mount the partitions. Opening it as root even from within pcmanfm itself solves the issue, I can mount the partitions easily. The expected behavior would be for pcmanfm to ask me for root permissions to mount the partitions on the fly. Does this count as a bug lol?

[archibald haddock]

You could add "user,noauto" as option in your fstab for the partition to allow normal users to mount it as needed.

I think it should at least say something more useful as error message.