Did a new installation of Manjaro openbox-lite

Read this review and report of setting it up in full here 
Announcement here
Download here
During a live session it seemed  to take longer to load.
Installing went easy and not much difference with Archbang.A slightly different menu when giving root password and creating user and user password.
Setting up the locale is also a bit different.
A important difference is that you can install the bootloader grub 2 in the own manjaro partition and you can prevent grub 2 overwriting the mbr by pointing to its own partition; you will get an error but at least your mbr can be updated in the way you want and won't be overwritten, something that is not possible in Archbang. Something to learn from Manjaro.

Installed I don't perceive any differences in speed with AB; it is snappy and the theme set up is so nice I leave it for the time being..

Dmenu
What I like is that dmenu is shown at the bottom of the screen (dmenu -b).
dmenu at the bottom, slightly different:
changed it in .conf/openbox/rc.xml  command from dmenu_run -i -b to
dmenu_run -fn -misc-fixed-*-*-*-*-20-200-*-*-*-*-*-*  -i -b -nf 'white' -sb 'brown' -nb 'black'
to have a larger font and other colors.

Htop is installed.
I don't like tint at the top of your screen.. When you change tint rc and put it at the bottom you will notice that the 28 pixels for the tint bar remain uncovered.
This is defined in /home/user/.config/openbox/rc.xml, line 156.

Very few keybindings are configured for starting up applications, terminal, filemanager, oblogout, dmenu. There are not many applications installed but leafpad (W_e) and one for viewnior (W_i) could be added.
I also use them for many of my fav applications like a second filemanager (W-s spacefm, w-f thunar),  vlc W-v, smplayer w-m, cd cat w-k, firefox w-w and chromium w-c, qbittorrent w-q etc.
In many distro's dmenu is configured with keybinding  alt-f3; here it is W-m; changed that directly.
Few keybindings for manipulating windows.
Geany is installed which is very nice when you are changing rc.xml in the code as I usually do.
Thunar is the default file manager; lxterminal the default terminal.
you can run a fine fast server script that is an fast way to run rankmirrors.
Parcellite isn't autostarted by default but an entry is in the autostart file, so that is easy to change.

.............

Firefox is not installed but you needn't install flashplugin after you install firefox.
arch-firefox-search-0.8.2-5 is not installed (just like I never got it into AB), while it is such a useful addition to using firefox.
The way to start using AUR could be made more easy; maybe with a menu link or so.
On the wiki page  yaourt is recommended by default, while I prefer packer.
So you wil have to install packer with yaourt or use the more complicated way:
You need fakeroot, git, jshon and base-devel

#pacman -S base-devel fakeroot git jshon

Download the PKGBUILD
and open terminal the folder where you put in and do

makepkg -sci PKGBUILD 

Move in terminal to where the package is build and do as root:

pacman -U packer-*.pkg.tar.xz

Used packer to install adeskbar which is my fav dock that I use in a very minmal set up (no tasklist).

....................

I installed mplayer-vdpau-svn to see how the depedency problems work out in Manjaro.
This should be rather  risky, considering the very complicated build of mplayer. No problems at all!! Very good, Manjaro!!
Very little diappointments till now...

I edit the line in ~./.config.Trolltech.conf
to add the line
style=GTK+
but it is already there (give qt applications a gtk look) ; amazing, really quite complete in fine tuning..

I'm not really satisfied with the font rendering...my easy solution I use for this is to install fontmatrix and a new set of fonts for which I mostly use Avenir LTD.

Installed spacefm with udevil as mounter.
have to add
devmon  &
to autostart
All in all hardly any thing of importance to complain about. Great job, Carl!

Manjaro Doing a live session with 084 openbox edition 64 bits

Doing a live session with 084 openbox edition  64 bits:
When starting up pamac automatic updates the system  with -nice- this info message:

libgl will be replaced by mesa-libgl
gummiboot-efi will be replaced by gummiboot
qt will be replaced by qt4
lib32-libgl will be replaced by lib32-mesa-libgl
lib32-libglapi will be replaced by lib32-mesa

Want to check out some installed packages with dmenu; no dmenu?? openbox without dmenu is like a tv without remote control.
Try to install via pamac; nothing happens, no error feedback.
So I go to terminal and use pacman.
After I unlocked the database by deleting var/lib/pacman/db.lck (reminded via feedback by pacman):

sudo pacman -S dmenu
:: The following packages should be upgraded first :
    pacman
:: Do you want to cancel the current operation
:: and upgrade these packages now? [Y/n] y

etc
Midori is a real pain in the ass as it crashes every time I try to copy some text with selecting and a right click; also it is not possible for some reason to login here on the AB forums.
Want to try out pamac again; get error message pamac is already running, although I closed it.
with dmenu I find out pamac is pamac-check-updates pamac-manager pamac-tray and pamac- updates
Kill each one of them, still running. Try htop to see what is running, no htop, install htop, nothing running recognizable as related to  pamac; give up...
Conclusion: pamac is a catastrophe for me; just like midori (never had luck with it)
For me essential apps like dmenu and  htop are not installed.
Openbox keybindings for starting applications are
terminal, synapse, appfinder, thunar, pamac-updater and pamac-manager, oblogout
A keyboard short cut for synapse OK with me,
but for appfinder: what happens is that you go from the keyboard to a mouse  menu to start an app?? This is like first taking your remote, then walking to the TV to set another channel by hand. Openbox is for me window management and application control with the keyboard keys and the best app for this is dmenu (or is it difficult to learn? I don't think so).
Synapse can't find lxappearance, never has this problem with dmenu.
First impression manjaro openbox edition is that it is a very difficult OB edition for an ABer like me; sorry, was hoping to be able to be more positive.
I have to first understand how things are simplified before I am able to solve a problem. This was my problem with ubuntu too.
This says everything about me as user and can't be generalized of course.

To end with a more positive note: everything looks fantastic, nice wall and theme set up are all working together to create something that is really a pleasure to see; top-notch: nice theme greenbird with faenza green icon theme; window border shiki-nouveau-wisedust, very,very nice.
Also compton is used with nice effects although the shadow option could be used better..but that is a matter of taste.

Some thoughts Manjaro compared to Archbang

I'm quite fed up with distrohopping.
As I find AB good enough as an easy Arch install medium I didn't feel the urge to try Manjaro till now. But I will do it now for this post.
But first  I want to make clear, that there are some things I really like about the Manjaro project.
The central aspect is that I have thought many a times, that Arch in a way is really easy;
with some extra instruction it could be made useful for a much larger user group.
Of course you are thinking about some friends etc. that I wouldn't suggest AB because of its difficulty.
But after the very bumpy change to systemd and bin to usr  bin and  some other update calamities I gave up on the whole idea. Arch devs seem(ed?) to have lost control.
And I wouldn't like to expose friends to the general hostility towards noobs in the Arch community too.
Still I find it a really generous attempt of the people over at Manjaro to take on this task of making Arch more accessible and am impressed with what they have accomplished so far.
On the Archbang forums we had some discussion if it would be a good idea to open Arch more and I remember that ArchVortex really was against the idea.
I don't have a fixed opinion about it, I want to explore this more.
My own feelings are mixed especially about providing a gui for pacman as default, pamac.
I find the feedback given by pacman really one of the most essential benefits from Arch and here on the forums I always discourage people to use a gui for pacman.
Of course, everybody can use pacman in Manjaro, but the educational choice has been made to learn the default user to manage package management with pamac (http://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Using … _Beginners). This is on first sight the greatest problem I have with Manjaro.
For the rest I do find gui's useful in a lot of cases; I hardly do any file management from the terminal for instance, probably also because I'm lousy typist. Just to make clear I'm not the regular terminal geek.
Choice for stability
Holding packages for some time (a month) to lessen update problems and increase stability is also an important aspect of Manjaro.
I'm curious about the experiences with that and especially if it doesn't give problems when installing from AUR. PKGBUILD are often very soon updated after a change in package naming/update; dependency handling in the PKGBUILD can get impossible for a certain period of time; in recent example it the change to naming some dependencies qt4 in stead of qt after the release of qt5 in the Arch repos om March the 3 .
I don't worry so much about the security aspect of it. I trust that really essential updates like that for web browsers or flash will be used as soon as possible.
My own experience that with using the stable repos from Arch and a quiet update scheme you can avoid a lot of problems. I think to have as few update problems as possible a weekly update is wise in AB. People with a lot of update problems tend to update once or twice a day.
Another feature are the multiple kernels. Having installed kernel-lts has proven for me to have some great benefits. I'm amazed Manjaro isn't using the linux-lts  kernel as default.
to be continued
p.s I saw that today the qt5 update had already been passed to manjaro repo's.

Alternatives for openbox-menu

screenshot of adeskbar
Some alternatives
tint 2:  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tint2
 adeskbar http://stillstup.blogspot.nl/2013/03/ne … stall.html
or the simpler adeskmenu: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/adeskmenu/
Or dmenu-launch https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=33379
or another dmenu-hack: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=80145

gnubiff alternative images

I like gnubiff but am not crazy about the tux image.
Created some alternative images: copy to usr/share/gnubiff
right click and save as: tux-awake.png and tux-sleep.png

If I inadvertently infringed on some copyrights let me know and I will remove the images directly.
To let gnubiff start up easily use the -n flag: gnubiff -n

If your gtk theme is distorted -Arch

Sometimes changing a default configuration of gtk themes goes wrong because an unlucky corrolation bteween gtk 2 and gtk 3 themes. The best solution is to delete or rename your gtk-3.0 and or gtk-2.0 folder in /home/user/.config and choose your new theme with lxappearance and then reboot. Also:

If you don't like the icon set AwOken (I prefer colour icons) you can change at the same time and the new settings .ini will have both changes.

Let QT apps look like gnome ones

found this solution:
    edit the .config/Trolltech.conf file by adding:

~/.config/Trolltech.conf

...
[Qt]
style=GTK+
...

source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un … plications

Simple solutions are the best ones...

New adeskbar install

http://pastebin.com/gy0MdPyR was a new adeskbar.install but it wasn't enough
to make a working adeskbar.
I downloaded  adeskbar , extracted the packages, edited main.py changed python in the first line to python2, copied the adeskbar folder to usr/share/, copied default.conf to home/paul/.config/adeskbar/  and created a symlink:
ln -s /usr/share/adeskbar/adeskbar.sh /usr/bin/adeskbar
Had to install all the many python deps:python-keybinder python2-pyinotify python-pyalsaaudio python-vte python-xlib pyhon-gio python2-wnck python-gmen. But it works now!!

Autologin while having systemd in Arch

I have researched diverse options to realize autologin after systemd came to Arch.
The simplest way is to have slim installed and edit /etc/slim.conf . Change
#auto_login         no
to: auto_login          yes
and
#default_user        live
to
default_user        username

Packages from AUR need to be rebuild - Arch

Update warning from Arch:

qt4 replaces qt

2013-03-01
A new qt4 package is in [extra]. This replaces the current qt package.
All packages depending on qt need to be rebuilt to depend on qt4. We have done this for all official packages, but you will need to rebuild packages installed from the AUR that depend on qt.

To know which package need to be rebuild you can use pkgtools
After installation (#pacman -S pkgtools) do

whoneeds qt

Then do

pacman -Qqm

to determine which packages are installed from AUR.
As the official packages are rebuild for you, you only have to rebuild the AUR packages.
For me it means I have to rebuild: cdcat fontmatrix  qbittorrent sir syncbackup.

This is an example why pacman is so fantastic:

:: Replace qt with extra/qt4? [Y/n] y
resolving dependencies...
looking for inter-conflicts...

error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: cdcat: requires qt
:: fontmatrix: requires qt>=4.3.0
:: qbittorrent: requires qt
:: sir: requires qt
:: syncbackup: requires qt