Enhancements etc for the ROX desktop environment

OroboROX themes

OroboROX is the recommended window manager for ROX. To apply one of these themes just unpack the archive and run the pseudo-application in Rox. In order for these themes to work correctly before a version of OroboROX newer than 0.9.9 is released you should download it by svn:

svn co https: // rox. svn. sourceforge. net / svnroot/ rox/ trunk/ OroboROX

Please see the adjacent note about the URL.

AlePanther

AlePanther 1.1

AlePanther is ported from Alejandro Vartabedian's Metacity theme "ale-panther" which is similar to Mac OS X Jaguar's window theme.

BlueAlloy

BlueAlloy 1.1

A theme I made myself based loosely on a cross between Metacity's Smokey and Alloy themes.

BlueAlloy's source contains the working files I used to create the theme.

Configuration applets

The configuration applets or "capplets" work in conjunction with ROX-Session to configure various aspects of the desktop. Unfortunately the archives described on ROX's website are out of date. Newer ones are available by subversion (svn) in the "config" subdirectory. The latest capplets are:

• Appearance
• Font
• Gamma
• Keyboard
• Mouse
• Resolution
• Screensaver

To download, for example, Appearance into the current directory:

svn co https: // rox. svn. sourceforge. net / svnroot/ rox/ trunk/ config/ Appearance

Please note the URL has had "invisible" spaces inserted to allow it to wrap to fit in with the text flow which unfortunately means it will be incorrect if cut & pasted. Instead type the "svn co " manually then right-click on the URL and copy the URL to the clipboard then paste it into your command line.

The other capplets can be downloaded the same way by substituting their name for "Appearance".

AutoStart

Although AutoStart falls into the category of a capplet it has a different heritage from the ones above. Its purpose is to manage XDG autostart desktop entries as used by GNOME and the latest C version of ROX-Session (and KDE?). This capplet is available by git from http://repo.or.cz/r/AutoStart.git or git://repo.or.cz/AutoStart.git. Or download a tarball:

Download AutoStart 0.1.0

Future directions

• The Screensaver, Resolution and Gamma configlets could probably be combined into a single Screen configlet.
• The pointer theme selector could be moved from Mouse to Theme.
• ROX-Lib and some other parts of the configlets could also be updated to use Combo instead of OptionMenu. ROX-Filer requires gtk 2.4 or newer, so it shouldn't matter if ROX-Lib also has that requirement. Python makes it easy to fall back to OptionMenu at run-time anyway.

Other observations and problems

• Theme's icon theme selector seems to list a load of Gnome themes that don't apply to ROX.
• The cursor theme in Mouse doesn't seem to have any effect.
• The toolbar style in Appearance doesn't seem to take effect either, even though it does update ROX-Session's setting and gconf correctly.
• The original versions of the configlets deferred the sending of the dbus message to a glib idle timeout handler for a reason I don't know. I looked to see what would happen if I changed it to send the message immediately, and rather than causing problems, this actually seemed to fix one: changing the font DPI setting formerly sometimes jumped 2 steps instead of 1. I've chosen to use immediate notification.