Adding Lock Screen to Fluxbox

It's easy to add lock screen to Fluxbox. You have many options but I'll stick to xscreensaver because it's the most bug free and standardized. For those using Arch Linux, just "pacman -S xscreensaver" and you get all that you need to run xscreensaver.

Adding the menu to Fluxbox is easy. I added the lock screen menu to ~/.fluxbox/usermenu. The additional menu entry as follows:

[separator]      
[exec] (Lock Screen) {xscreensaver-command -lock} 
[separator]      

I added the separator to make the menu entry stand-out, to reduce the possibility to inadvertently click it. This is how it looks like in my Fluxbox "root" menu (the lock screen menu entry color is inverted for emphasis):

You have to start the xscreensaver "server" upon starting Xorg. In my case, I add the following line to ~/.xprofile:

xscreensaver -no-splash &

Pay attention that you have to make sure that ~/.xprofile is parsed by ~/.xinitrc when you start Xorg. This is my ~/.xinitrc:

#!/bin/sh

# Make sure this is before the 'exec' command or it won't be sourced.
[ -f /etc/xprofile ] && source /etc/xprofile
[ -f ~/.xprofile ] && source ~/.xprofile

# Parse .Xresources
[[ -f ~/.Xresources ]] && xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources

exec startfluxbox

Hopefully this is useful for others using Fluxbox out there.

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