Screen tear in openbox because of composite manager

 An recurring annoyance in Openbox is screen tear. It is especially likely to occur when using xcompmgr or another composite manager. The solution is to disable xcompmgr in /home/user/.config/openbox 

Or better still create a bash script and connect this to a hotkey as described here

Active edges for *box like wm's

This is taken from the gentoo wiki on Fluxbox:
Active edges

Also known as Hot corners, active corners, or similar. In fluxbox, you don't have the possibility of binding actions to special mouse positions on the screen. For example you might want to switch Desktops, if your mouse hits the side of your screen (like in e17). However, there is a small python script, that you can use and modify depending on your needs. This script does not principally depend on fluxbox, you can use it in other Window managers as well. You can add this script to your .fluxbox/startup, so that the script is run in background and autostarts with fluxbox.

For the script code in python see:source: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Fluxbox

How to Make openbox menu transparent -Arch

Remove xcompmgr
#pacman -R xcompmgr

Install xcompmgr-dana:
$packer -S xcompmgr-dana

Add to /home/username/.config/openbox/autostart.sh:
xcompmgr -fF -t-5 -l-5 -r4.2 -o.55 -D2 -m.83 &

Thanks Dana for your work on Openbox!!


crunchbang

This is the most accessible way to experiment with Openbox.
See a nice review here

But a much nicer way is to follow this guide by Urukrama

Working with Openbox is addictive because of its simpleness, very productive because of keybindings and dmenu. Other good points are its ease of configuration, its wonderful looks, its fastness, low system requirements.
It's the complete opposite fo Winows Vista where everything is bloated and overdone with unnecessary complicated menu's.
On a well configured Openbox system the learning curve for pc newbies will be much and much lower than on any other configuration I know.

This is the way to go for people in education working with older hardware and possibilities to deploy a specific software setup.

Another competitor in this field is SliTaz
The wonderful thing about SliTaz is that it is the ideal on-the-road distro with a Usbstick on which you can very easily put your home partition. A problem I found that it doesn't support a very high screen resolution.
A critical review here

Just try it and you'll never regret it.

Making Keybindings in OpenBox more accessible with Conky

Open box is a wonderful clean window manager that is very low on resources when you start an openbox session. And if you use the wonderful Tranquility Open box theme computung starts to get really nice. (Don't miss the wonderful pine background).

The best place to start is Urukrama weblog that has a very clear and easy install guide for Open box and all kind of extra possiblities to enrich the OpenBox environment.
When I was asked to prepare a pc for a 12 year old child on a old 500 mhz Pentium my thoughts immediately were about how to make the OpenBox environment easy and super user-friendly.
In the Crunchbang distro. that I didn't want to use I saw how conky was used as a reminder for keybindings for starting programs. In openBox keybindings are very easily set in the rc.xml file in ./config/openbox. There is a gui program that is to be used when setting a theme for instance, Obconfig, a fine program but without the possibility to set keybindings. The basics are explained here.
Urukrama gives some suggestions for using keybindings to start programs. Here is what I have defined as keybindings.



And here is the .conkyrc file that comes with it and is palced in the ./home folder:

# conky configuration
#
# The list of variables has been removed from this file in favour
# of keeping the documentation more maintainable.
# Check http://conky.sf.net for an up-to-date-list.
#
# For ideas about how to modify conky, please see:
# http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/59/my-conky-config/
#
# For help with conky, please see:
# http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/2047/conky-help/
#
# Enjoy! :)
##############################################
# Settings
##############################################
background yes
use_xft yes
xftfont Sans:size=8
xftalpha 1
update_interval 1.0
total_run_times 0
own_window yes
own_window_transparent no
own_window_type desktop
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
double_buffer yes
minimum_size 200 200
maximum_width 240
draw_shades yes
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders no
default_color white
default_shade_color black
default_outline_color white
alignment top_right
gap_x 12
gap_y 12
no_buffers yes
uppercase no
cpu_avg_samples 2
override_utf8_locale no
##############################################
# Output
##############################################
TEXT
SYSTEM INFO:
${hr}
Host:$alignr$nodename
Uptime:$alignr$uptime
RAM:$alignr$mem/$memmax
Swap usage:$alignr$swap/$swapmax
Disk usage:$alignr${fs_used /}/${fs_size /}
CPU usage:$alignr${cpu cpu0}%


SHORTCUT KEYS:
${hr}
Alt+F2$alignr Run Dialog
Alt+F3$alignr Alt Menu
Super+space$alignr Programma Menu
Super+tab$alignr Client Menu
Super+t$alignr Terminal
Super+f$alignr Bestanden
Super+e$alignr Tekstje
Super+m$alignr Mediaspeler
Super+w$alignr Web Browser
Super+g$alignr Graphics Editor
Super+a$alignr Afbeeldingen
Super+l$alignr Word
Super+p$alignr Programma Paneel
Super+b$alignr Branden
Super+o$alignr Logout
PrtSc$alignr Screenshot

B.t.w you can find a wonderful closedown menu and script here (Python).