Slow fluxbox - a fix (involves a recompile)

[Peter Garrett]

On Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:43:40 -0400
Frank McCormick <fmccormick at videotron.ca> wrote:

> 
> Hi all
>  Trying out a few new window managers...and ran into a problem with
> Fluxbox. It takes a full 30 secs to load the desktop, which is pretty
> plain and simple. Reloads from the menu take the same time and changing
> themes (which flux calls "styles") take almost as long. I used Fluxbox
> and Blackbox on other distros a couple of years back and they never
> took that long to do anything.

hi Frank: from an earlier post....

On Tue, 24 May 2005 16:33:34 +0300
Amichai Teumim <amichai.teumim at gmail.com> wrote:

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> 
> Hi guys
> 
> This is regarding fluxbox
> 
> "if its not too much trouble - please mail the maintainer of the
> package and tell him to --disable-xmb so that this problem is fixed
> once and for all. your not the first person that has this problem"
> 
> "its something about the font server being flooded with queries."

<snip>

My delighted reply was: (!)

This is the answer! Thanks for the info!

I just recompiled fluxbox thus: (including what you should need to make it work)

1.  sudo apt-get install build-essential  checkinstall   #(I already had these, but in case you don't)
2.  sudo apt-get install xlibs-dev   #(you'll need this or it won't compile)
3.  Get the source tarball and tar xvjf <fluxbox-tarball-of-choice> [edit: if it's a tar.bz2 ;  tar xvzf for tar.gz]
4.  cd to the directory created
5.  ./configure --enable-kde --enable-gnome --disable-xmb  (note the --disable-xmb!)
6.  make
7.  sudo checkinstall 
(optional, instead of "sudo make install", but makes it easier to uninstall and so on)

This should build a package for you and install the fluxbox binary in /usr/local/bin
If you make a ~/.xsession file for it you should now be able to start it from the Default session in GDM. 

Flux now starts for me in seconds, and no longer eats my cpu for breakfast when I try to change themes... ;-)

Hope this helps someone...

Peter


the answer is the --disable-xmb option in the configure step, as above. My Fluxbox now is its usual snappy self! I actually did mail the maintainer- but maybe we have to wait for Breezy for an Ubuntu fix?