Making X Sexy

This is just a (barely organized) chronicle of steps I've taken to gussy up my X11 desktop.  This is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure, when it comes to doing silly and marginally useful stuff to customize an X11 desktop.  The intertrons are littered with better (read more extreme) examples than this.  If you get through this and aren't satisfied, then you're on your own, and may God have mercy on your soul.

This page is included in the gentoo section because.. well... I'm using gentoo, and most of the install steps I mention start with 'emerge' (which is gentoo's package management command).  As usual, once you're past the emerge command, things cease being very gentoo specific, so it's not like this won't be useful if you're using another distro.  Presumably you know how to install packages (and/or tarballs) on your distro.

1. If you're running X, stop.  We'll restart it after we get the window manager installed.
   
2. Install a window manager.
• I've chosen fluxbox as my windowmanager ('wm' in the parlance).  If you're using (or want to use) another wm, then all bets are off.  I can't guarantee anything else in this guide will work on another wm (at least not in the way that I describe it).

• emerge -avt fluxbox

• make sure that imlib is an active USE flag for this emerge (i.e. it shows 'imlib' and not '-imlib').
3. Install a decent terminal app.
• I've chosen aterm.  As with the wm, much of what follows is specific to this choice.

• emerge -avt aterm

• make sure that background is an active USE flat for this emerge (i.e. it shows 'background' and not '-background')
  
4. Install something that can manage background images.
• For some bizarre reason, fluxbox is not capable of managing background images.  It has a commandline tool called 'fbsetbg' (and 'fbsetroot') but those aren't sufficient for what we need to do.  Fluxbox itself recommends using the esetroot capability of eterm, so that's what we'll do.

• emerge -avt eterm

5. Set a background image.

• fbsetbg -f <path to image file>

• see this chapter in the fluxbox manual for more info ('fbsetbg -h' is good too)
  
6. asdf