Fluxbox is a continuation of blackbox with several feature additions. It's a very light weight, very simple, and easy to use. I started using fluxbox during the 0.9.x versions, which ended up lasting most of 4 years.

In the past I ran the development versions and built fluxbox from source. With the recent release of 1.0 I decided to stay with the stable version this time around. The FreeBSD port has already been updated so installation was a snap.

After the port installation:
echo exec startfluxbox > ~/.xinitrc

Then fluxbox can be launched with the startx command. I've never used any type of graphical login program, like gdm. Graphical login just seems unnecessary to me.

Now that I could run fluxbox I quickly built the native Firefox installation for FreeBSD and checked out the wiki. Fluxbox has serveral tooks available now that makes configuring your desktop much easier. Fluxmenu will let you quickly build your right click menu system and fluxconf will let you set all your keyboard commands. Fluxbox has some built in styles in the menu, I normally use one of those. Then Fbsetbg can be used to set your desktop background. You will need to install a wallpaper setter. Feh and esetroot seem to be the popular ones. I'm using esetroot at the moment. I normally get my backgrounds from digitalblasphemy.com. They have realy nice images for a very low cost subscription.

Now we have a pretty interface with menu's and backgrounds but I like to have transparency when I work on FreeBSD. True transparency is now available in fluxbox. You must install/port xcompmgr and transset-df.

If your using an nvidia card and not the stupid nv x.org driver we can add a few things to your xorg.conf to improve performance

Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"

If your using an ATI drive you would add

Option "backingstore" "true"

You must also add a new section to your xorg.conf

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
Option "RENDER" "Enable"
EndSection

Exit fluxbox and relaunch with startx for your adjustments to take effect. Open a terminal and use 'transset-df 0.6' then 'xcompmgr -c &' to enable the trasparency. I added 'xcompmgr -c &' as a menu option using fluxmenu. I'm sure we could start it automatically but transparency is considered a work in progess so I took the safe road.

The default transparency settings can be adjusted in your ~/.fluxbox/init Below are my alpha settings.

session.screen0.menu.alpha: 200
session.screen0.slit.alpha: 200
session.screen0.toolbar.alpha: 200
session.screen0.window.focus.alpha: 235
session.screen0.window.unfocus.alpha: 100

You can manually adjust these settings on a per window basis by right clicking on the menu bar and going to transparency. I find 100 on unfocused windows gives me a very readable yet transparent look. For me its all about being able to read multiple windows at the same time.