Interesting problem with Fluxbox on Gentoo

[linux_composer]

Greetings all, and I hope my first post is a good one :p

After trawling the forums, I have seen nothing that is close to what I am experiencing, however I assume the problem to be with X, rather than with Flux.

Symptoms:

When the Fluxbox desktop appears:

1) The bar at the foot of the screen is about half the width of the moniitor, and centred.

2) Everything is black, save the mouse cursor and the aforementioned bar at the foot of the screen, which is light greyish. When producing a menu on the desktop, it is dark, and I can only just see the menu text and the outline of the menu boxes.

Fluxbox works, however, and exits to the shell, with no problems. However, it does throw back a load of error messages all starting with "couldn't alloc color" followed by a few numbers. This line appears many times, and fall off the top of the display. The last line of the error dump is "color alloc error: rgb:9a/9a/90"

Any thoughts? I have played with the settings in XFree86 -configure to no avail. I have had KDE running fine after setting up X as normal.

Computer is AMD Athlon 1.1gHz, running Gentoo, fresh install. So far I have only emerged Fluxbox and Fluxbox Configure.

Many thanks,
David.

[dunbar]

Welcome to LNO! Umm, sorry I'm not going to be much help here.... Sounds like you addressed what I would have done: xf86 configuration is where I would have gone first. Did you look at the flux configuration files for oddness?

[linux_composer]

Thanks!

Unfortunately, I woudln't know what is oddness and whit is normalness, as this is the first time I have installed Fluxbox. (I started life with RedHat, and only recently started rolling my own linuxes with Gentoo, and even then stuck with KDE.) I decided to give KDE the boot on my main machine last niight!

I will have an investigation into the flux config files though!

[dunbar]

Good. let us know, we do have a few fluxers somewhere around this forum.

[linux_composer]

I can find nothing interesting for the needed remedy, unfortunately.

[swangods]

This sounds like a silly suggestion - have you used Flux on other distros? Have you tried changing the style to something brighter? Maybe the default style on your installation is just something awful on your monitor setup. Doesn't explain the alloc errors... but give it a try at least for cosmetic sake!

[linux_composer]

Not a silly suggestion at all! Thanks!

Now I know *what* the problem is, just not what is *causing* the problem!

With different schemes, all I get is different shades of black OR blue (depending on the selected scheme): never more than one colour at one time.

[linux_composer]

Now it has become more interesting.

It seems that Fluxbox is having big problems reproducing colours correctly, but when I installed and launched the web browser Dillo, the browser and websites appear as normal.


When choosing solid background colours, they all appear black, except for white, which appears white. Even "snow" is black.

Yours confusedly,

David

[sharth]

try a theme change?

[linux_composer]

Changing the theme has no effect, other than slightly changing the shape of things...

[JohnT]

When an error has been detected and corrected, it will be found
to have been wrong in the first place.


There should be some type of fluxbox config for the RGB color on your themes. Look in /home/.fluxbox

[linux_composer]

Well, in /root there are four files, namely init, keys, menu and slitlist.

In /home/david/.fluxbox, there is nothing.

Another thing I have noticed, is that when I run fluxbox as root, I have a full menu. When I run it as my from user logon, I get only three menu items. (Can't look now, as something quite large is emerging...)

Many thanks for the help!

[JohnT]

Maybe try to find the path for the emerge install of fluxbox and compare with the intended path. The two might be at odds, Not installing to expected directories.

[seekdeath]

Dont know if u got it workin yet, but i had the same problem and here was my solution

using XFree86 -configure produced a XF86Config that would start X but i was only in 8 or 16 color (forget which).

Once i edited XF86Config to include my desktop size at 24 bit color flux started up with the correct colors.

[linux12414]

Originally posted by linux_composer
Well, in /root there are four files, namely init, keys, menu and slitlist.

In /home/david/.fluxbox, there is nothing.

Another thing I have noticed, is that when I run fluxbox as root, I have a full menu. When I run it as my from user logon, I get only three menu items. (Can't look now, as something quite large is emerging...)

Many thanks for the help!

I use Fluxbox, but on Slack and RH 7.3--never had any problems with it, but your problems with menus in user accounts *probably* has something to do with the fact that you have no menu in your ~/.fluxbox directory.

When I attempted to edit the menu in my /usr/local/share/fluxbox directory, it never worked correctly; it was only when I created a menu in the user accounts that it worked. Maybe this has something to do with the idiosyncrasies of the distros I use--who knows.

I would take the advice of another poster re: your color problems---checking your config files for flux on how it handles r/g/b, etc.

Sorry I couldn't be more help :(

[JohnT]

This is an old thread.