More coolness for the PowerMac G5 Openbox rice (ArchPOWER)

After getting a first working Openbox setup on the G5, it still felt a little plain. Time to crank up the cool factor a bit without adding any packages that aren’t available in the ArchPOWER repos. And there are a lot of Packages not available as I learned along the way.

Tweaks

A glossier Graphite-Amber theme

The Openbox theme was refined with a vertical gradient on active titlebars, a brighter amber accent (), slightly softer borders, and animated iconify. The window buttons got a bit more contrast and a proper hover/press state. Inactive windows went a touch more muted to help the focused one pop.

Taller, cleaner panel

moved up to 30px with a slightly glossier panel background, larger icons (22px), more breathing room between modules, and a bold clock. CPU and memory monitors update a little faster and feel less cramped now.

Flashier rofi

Rofi now has a 2px amber border, more padding, larger icons (24px), cleaner spacing between entries and a proper amber selection highlight with dark text. Subtle, but it looks much slicker in use.

Richer wallpaper

The generated wallpaper got a bit more depth: a warmer amber glow in the bottom-right, a soft top highlight and very light dithering to avoid banding on the G5’s LCD.

What stayed the same

The session is still a clean, separate LightDM entry (), Xfce4 remains untouched, and it only uses what’s in the ArchPOWER repos (, , , , , ). Tiling shortcuts, the hand-written menu with Breeze icons and the cheatsheet () all remain intact.

What broke on the first reboot (and why)

A rice is only as good as its boring parts, and mine had three of them:

• Black desktop. nitrogen --restore silently did nothing, because the section header of ~/.config/nitrogen/bg-saved.cfg was hand-written as [:0.0]. Nitrogen writes [xin_-1] there and ignores anything else without a word of complaint, leaving Xorg’s default black root window. The autostart now sets the wallpaper explicitly with nitrogen --set-zoom-fill, which cannot miss.
• Panel reduced to a stripe. lxpanel’s config parser is line-oriented. Compact one-liners like Plugin { type = space Config { Size = 6 } } made it drop every plugin, leaving an empty bar. Rewritten in the canonical multi-line format, the panel is back at full width with launchers, pager, taskbar, CPU/RAM, tray and clock.
• Two autostart landmines. xfce4-notifyd lives in /usr/lib/xfce4/notifyd/ and is not on PATH, and xset s off noblank is not a valid invocation (it is two commands). Both fixed.

Lesson learned: a session can be verified headlessly with Xvfb and xwd, but Xvfb never renders the root window background into its framebuffer, so wallpaper checks must happen on real hardware.

Resources

• ArchPOWER
• Openbox
• nouveau Wiki