I killed the menu on blackbox

[lonescout]

Man, why is it every time I try to "expand my horizons", I fall of the edge of the earth. I recently installed blackbox, and have been running it (quite happily, except for a few crash and burns, do to stupidity and, I guess, general noobie mistakes). Anway this time I think I really goofed something up.
I've gotten pretty confident with the menu bar. First I created my own. Then someone here mentioned that Perl script that does it for you, so I used that. (Ooops, woulda been nice to back up the old one, cause it wiped out alot of the KDE stuff I manually went and put it, but oh well..no biggie it's a really cool little script) Soooooo figured, while I'm at it, I'll see what "styles" and backgrounds are out there.
Well, I downloaded two..clouded mind and clouded mind emerald or something. Really like them... they're nice looking and all but one small problem. My entire menu goes black. Only reason I got back to normal, was I could sorta visualize where on the menu bar the "default ones were" and just picked whichever one I landed on. It's like a fully functional menu bar that's just Black..black background and letters!
I guess, at this point, I should explain that the two files came as a .tgz I gunzipped, then tar -xvf'd then moved the resulting file into the existing "styles" folder in my .blackbox directory. (I did think it was odd that they untarred into their own "styles" directory, but I just assumed that they should have to go into the existing one). I switched (tried both and the backgrounds worked) and then POOF I have a fully functional ALL BLACK menu bar.

Any ideas what I did wrong?

[BigFatJoe]

I had a problem like that once...but not really. I had the same exact black menu, but mine was most likely caused by a different problem. To make a long story short, I figured out these styles were made for Blackbox for Win and had some stuff added that just didnt run on Linux. You're best bet...check the styles for any wacky functions or system calls (maybe some font, or something). Another thing, you may want to check that the file loads correctly by examining .blackboxrc (check the path). And while I'm on the subject. if you lose your menu or something, the easiest way is to pop up a terminal or switch to a console, and edit your .blackboxrc to boot your old style. If you can't get blackbox to "reconfigure" on the fly, simply exit windows and blackbox and next time you start it, it will use the modified .blackboxrc.

And if you do figure out the reason, go ahead and post it.

Luck!

[lonescout]

he he...didn't even know that blackbox existed for windoze (am I understanding you correctly?)

...anyway, thanx for the very helpful info...I'm not gonna give up on trying some others. I just found it odd that everything worked, I just couldn't see any of the text in the menu.

Since you've tried this, apparently with some success, i have to ask. when I download a functional "style", I should simple just copy it to the "styles" directory right? From what I see, it appears it actually reads the mena from /home/<username>/.blackbox directory.....then you put the styles and bagrounds into their separate directorys. Hopefully I'm doing this right?

Thanx again for the info

[Allen614]

You can edit the "styles" files with a text editor. You can write your own or change the existing ones.

[BigFatJoe]

Originally posted by lonescout
he he...didn't even know that blackbox existed for windoze (am I understanding you correctly?)

...anyway, thanx for the very helpful info...I'm not gonna give up on trying some others. I just found it odd that everything worked, I just couldn't see any of the text in the menu.

Since you've tried this, apparently with some success, i have to ask. when I download a functional "style", I should simple just copy it to the "styles" directory right? From what I see, it appears it actually reads the mena from /home/<username>/.blackbox directory.....then you put the styles and bagrounds into their separate directorys. Hopefully I'm doing this right?

Thanx again for the info

yes, they did a port of blackbox to windows. last time I ran windows, the blackbox was pretty sleek but it had some problems with resource management/crashing (I probably would not balme the coders, but windows itself)
; )

you should really check the particular styles file to determine if its loading some fonts or something that is not possible. this can oftern cause a problem you described. another thing to check is that your Xconfig supports the color range that is mentioned in the style,and vice versa. By "everything", I guess you mean the bsetbg and toolbar. if somethings messed up with the color format (or resolution) your menu may not want to draw itself correctly.

This is how it works. Depending on what distro you use, it installs the default somewhere. If I were you, I would create a personal blackbox directory (ie. ~/.blackbox) and move all the necessary files there (styles/* ; menu ; backgrounds/*).

Next, all you do is configure your ~/.blackboxrc:
session.styleFile: /home/user/.blackbox/styles/style
session.menuFile: /home/user/.blackbox/menu

Next configure your menu (which you have either created, or moved to ~/.blackbox)
Among the other options you may want to configure, you need to change:

[submenu] (Themes) {}
[stylesdir] (/home/user/.blackbox/styles/)
[end]

^seeems pretty self explanatory. it creates a new submenu "Themes" and the [stylesdir] tag tells the menu where to look for its styles. These styles are then listed in the menu, and when you click one, it automatically updates the ~/.blackboxrc to the new style.

Hope that helps, and doesn't drag on TOO much...
; )