Recently, I tried to find out the alternatives of how to make my Linux Mint 19 (Tara) Cinnamon Edition to be more lightweight. There are some options such as installing the light Desktop Environment (DE) such as Xfce, LXDE, or LXQt. Those DEs are bundled with their specific applications such as file managers, text editors, etc. which will also be installed. Therefore, there will be duplication of applications for each task in my system which I don't prefer. So, my decision fall to installing Fluxbox. It's only a window manager and I just have the available applications from Mint to use.

Installing Fluxbox is easy. We just need to type the following command in terminal.

sudo apt-get install fluxbox

After installing Fluxbox, we may need to populate menu for easier access to applications in Linux Mint. We can use the Menu Maker script which can be downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/menumaker/. After we download it, just extract the file and open the terminal from inside of the extraction result. Then type the following command.

./mmaker -vf FluxBox

The Arch Linux documentation page about FluxBox (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fluxbox#MenuMaker) provides a very great explanation.

We can logout from our current session in Mint then we will see there is a FluxBox option to choose.

But, there are three problems I found when working on Linux Mint FluxBox in my laptop. Here they are.

• I can't perform mouse left-click by tapping on my touchpad.
• External storage such as USB device is not automatically mounted when plugged in.
• Network manager applet is not loaded at start.

Fortunately, Fluxbox as an autostart script to enable us starting some applications at start. So, we need to edit the file /home//.fluxbox/startup then add the following lines.

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/cinnamon-settings-daemon/csd-mouse &
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/cinnamon-settings-daemon/csd-automount &
nm-applet &

The first line will enable the mouse left-clicking by tapping the touchpad. The second will enable external storage automounting feature, and the third line will automatically load the network manager applet so we can connect to the network easily.

One more thing. If you want to add shutdown option in your Fluxbox menu, please follow this tutorial. It has a very clear explanation about that.