Multimedia keyboard buttons configuration for Openbox

[djohnston]

unist,

It looks to me like you've given a 100% "good ol' college try" on making rc.xml work. I think Melodie needs to address the issues you're having with it. I'm going to give hotkeys a try today. Should be posting on the results tomorrow. The only drawback I see with customizing rc.xml, besides the inordinate amount of time trying to get it to work correctly, is that it will only work with Openbox. Maybe we need to look at something more "universal" like hotkeys.

Thanks for hanging in there. You might see if you can dig up any additional information on the Openbox wiki.

[melodie]

Hi,
My suggest of the day : try the plain mplayer commands instead of umplayer and amixer.

[unist]

It's a pleasure to learn with the orientation of both of you. I'll keep trying, tomorrow with the plain mplayer commands instead of umplayer and amixer, following melodie, and I'll dig up on the Openbox wiki............

[melodie]

It's a pleasure to learn with the orientation of both of you. I'll keep trying, tomorrow with the plain mplayer commands instead of umplayer and amixer, following melodie, and I'll dig up on the Openbox wiki............

Nice to read, thanks !
If the solution does not come out, I could visit the #openbox chan at oftc server to ask for advice there (you can too if you know how to use an IRC client).

[djohnston]

unist,

Honestly, I seem to be going around in circles on rc.xml. I think I'll save that "project" for another day.

We're back to acme. I finally figured out how to make it call the email and web browser programs you want it to. You probably still have acme installed. If so, your multimedia keys are already defined. They're just calling the wrong email and web browser programs. Let's fix that. Gnome configuration is where the values are stored. To begin with, open Synaptic, click Reload, click Mark All Upgrades. Then click the Search button. Enter gconf in the search window. GConf2 should already be installed. If not, install it. Then mark the package gconf-editor for installation. Then click the Apply button. Click Apply again in the small window that appears. Once everything is installed, close Synaptic.

The next thing we need to do is make a slight change to the gconf-editor.desktop file. We'll also make a backup copy of the file, just in case. You need to be root to do this. Do the following in a terminal.

su -
cp /usr/share/applications/gconf-editor.desktop /usr/share/applications/gconf-editor.desktop.old
leafpad /usr/share/applications/gconf-editor.desktop

The desktop file will now be displayed as text in the leafpad window. Scroll to the bottom of the file. Find the line that begins with Categories=. Change the line to what is shown below in green.

Categories=GNOME;GTK;X-MandrivaLinux-System-Configuration-Other;

Copy the line from this post and paste it into the editor if you need to. Save the file and close leafpad. In the terminal, enter:

exit
exit

Now right-click the desktop to get the Openbox menu. Go to:
Applications>More Applications>Configuration>Configuration Editor

In the left pane of the window, go to:
desktop>gnome>url-handlers

In the chrome, ftp, http and https sections, change the web browser shown to the one you want to use. Double-click the command value in the right pane. It may show one of two different ways (as shown below) after double-clicking it. Either way, change the value field to the name of the web browser you want to use, then press [ENTER].





In the mailto section, double-click the command value and enter the name of the mail client you want to use. Close the Configuration Editor window, start acme, and your hotkeys should be working.

[melodie]

The next thing we need to do is make a slight change to the gconf-editor.desktop file. We'll also make a backup copy of the file, just in case. You need to be root to do this. Do the following in a terminal.

su -
cp /usr/share/applications/gconf-editor.desktop /usr/share/applications/gconf-editor.desktop.old
leafpad /usr/share/applications/gconf-editor.desktop

The desktop file will now be displayed as text in the leafpad window. Scroll to the bottom of the file. Find the line that begins with Categories=. Change the line to what is shown below in green.

Categories=GNOME;GTK;X-MandrivaLinux-System-Configuration-Other;

Copy the line from this post and paste it into the editor if you need to. Save the file and close leafpad. In the terminal, enter:

exit
exit

Hi djohnston,
Any easy way to get it to work as unist needs seems good to me. Using gconf is a good idea indeed. I just want to share here a tip : if you create a folder with the name "applications" under the ~/.local/share directory and copy the desired *.desktop files there as simple user, then(1) you can edit them also as simple user, (2) you don't need to do a backup of the file, and (3) you don't fear it will be rewritten when an upgrade will occur. I did that yesterday for a bunch of files, it works very well.

[djohnston]

I just want to share here a tip : if you create a folder with the name "applications" under the ~/.local/share directory and copy the desired *.desktop files there as simple user, then(1) you can edit them also as simple user, (2) you don't need to do a backup of the file, and (3) you don't fear it will be rewritten when an upgrade will occur. I did that yesterday for a bunch of files, it works very well.

Thanks for the tip, Mel. Just want to wait on unist's reply. Then I'll recommend he copy the edited file to his ~/.local/share directory. I had wondered if there was a way to keep those changed desktop files from being overwritten on updates. Now I know. Thanks again.

[melodie]

I just want to share here a tip : if you create a folder with the name "applications" under the ~/.local/share directory and copy the desired *.desktop files there as simple user, then(1) you can edit them also as simple user, (2) you don't need to do a backup of the file, and (3) you don't fear it will be rewritten when an upgrade will occur. I did that yesterday for a bunch of files, it works very well.

Thanks for the tip, Mel. Just want to wait on unist's reply. Then I'll recommend he copy the edited file to his ~/.local/share directory. I had wondered if there was a way to keep those changed desktop files from being overwritten on updates. Now I know. Thanks again.

Well I remembered the wine program wrote a bunch of (crap) desktop files in a hidden place in my home and at first I didn't know how to get rid of the entry menus even after I had uninstalled the program and removed all of .wine directory from my home user. So I thought I could give it a try the other way around, to override the system desktop files. And that works! I started to test using Nautilus to manage the desktop and icons here in my T60 (see the January screenshot I posted), then started to remove multiple entries in the Openbox menu with this method. It is starting to look like something interesting!