[howto] Write an Openbox Pipe Menu

Those of you are using openbox might wantto utilize your coding skills into creating somethings useful for your desktop. I’m making this guide with selected references from the official one at the OB3 wiki and also I ill share my own created pipemenu here so that it gives you an idea about how to create your own!

Pipe menus are dynamic menus, built on-the-fly from scripts. These are referred to as “Pipe menus” since the script’s output is piped back to Openbox and used for the menu. There are a number of pipe menus written by various people available through the Pipe menus page.

A pipe menu can be created by placing the following into a menu file, such as menu.xml:

<menu id="ID" label="TITLE" execute="COMMAND" />

Thereafter the pipe menu can be referenced just like any other menu.

[Out-dated] GRUB-GFX {Graphical Grub Menu}

GRUB-GFX will transform your ugly grub menu into a beautiful one.

First remove your older grub:

apt-get remove grub

Download the 32bit version from here. I use 64bit, but it’s not available anywhere it seems so I might upload it somewhere if someone requests!

Goto the folder where you downloaded it and install using

dpkg -i filename.deb

Download the suse grub from here. Put it in a new folder else it will get messy!

cpio -i < message.suse

This will extract it! See toldya’ it will get messy!

Now edit the pictures as you want and then put it back up:

ls . |cpio -o > /boot/grub/message.custom

If you don’t want to go through this hassle there are countless themes already there, search in Gnome-look.org or KDE-look.org. For debian users you can try out this one.

Just copy it into /boot/grub

cp mesage.debianorange /boot/grub/

Then edit your menu.lst

Code:

sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst_backup
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

and make it use gfxboot

Code:

gfxmenu /boot/grub/message.suse # the suse can be replaced

Type in:

grub
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hdx,y) # this will be the output
grub> root (hdx,y)
grub> setup (hdx)

Replace hdx,y with whatever output it shows, for me it was (hd0,1)

Now :

grub-install /dev/hda [or sda whichever is your MBR]

update-grub

Reboot and enjoy!

NOTE: Please follow this guide if you run into any problem.