Tip for using obmenu-generator in Openbox

greenjeans · 2024-12-07 16:26:18

So for folks who like to tinker with Openbox and want to use obmenu-generator, A quick tip.

I love this menu program, it really makes a startling difference compared to the default static menu, it's one of the things that made me fall in love with Miyolinux back in 2017, and the menus it generated were larger and very modern looking and gorgeous.

Back then, all it took was the binary in path, a schema file in home, and loading the perl module Linux-DesktopFiles.

Fast forward to now, when I started messing with Openbox, I went and checked documentation, downloaded obmenu-generator, but now it called for 3 perl modules plus an optional 4th if you wanted localization support. I wanted to try to do it "by the book" , so I installed cpanminus, installed all the modules and installed obmenu-generator as instructed. Ran the commands to get it started.

And got some tiny thing that looked almost nothing like the big pretty menus I was used to. It was dynamic, it did have icons on there, but it was all squished down to the size of the original static menu and basically looked just like it. I spent an hour trying to re-config it, but no joy. In fact it seemed like no amount of tinkering with the config file did anything at all, changing icon size etc. Nothing.

So, in another partition dedicated to a new version of Openbox Vuu-do, I decided to do it different, one step at a time to try and figure it out. So I did NOT install cpanminus, I installed the obmenu-generator files, then unpacked only the Linux-DesktopFiles module and installed manually. Generated a menu and BOOM my pretty menu was back!

I'm guessing it was maybe the GTK3 module that made the menu ugly, sounds like many other issues i've had with it, and maybe possible to fix with some snooping and re-configging. But I really don't have time to dig into that, i've spent plenty time already trying to make various GTK3 things work and not suck.

Edit: To install perl modules manually:
Install: libmodule-build-perl if it's not already installed.

Then unpack the desktop:files tar.gz, open terminal in that folder, su to root, then one at a time, seriously, one line at a time and hit enter, let it work, and then when you get command prompt back do the next line;

 perl Build.PL
     ./Build
     ./Build test
     ./Build install

Last edited by greenjeans (2024-12-07 16:37:17)

delgado · 2024-12-07 19:49:44

obmenu-generator is really great and one of few non-standard tools I add to a an installation.

Head_on_a_Stick provides a deb-package https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=34723#p34723 (thanks for that)

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#1 2024-12-07 16:26:18

Tip for using obmenu-generator in Openbox

#2 2024-12-07 19:49:44

Re: Tip for using obmenu-generator in Openbox

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