Openbox is a lightweight, powerful, and highly configurable stacking window manager with extensive standards support. It may be built upon and run independently as the basis of a unique desktop environment, or within other integrated desktop environments such as KDE and Xfce, as an alternative to the window managers they provide. The LXDE desktop environment is itself built around Openbox.
Openbox is included in most popular linux distributions. However if the latest version is not available to you through your distribution, you can download it from the download page. Packages are available there for a few distrubutions, as well as the source code which you can compile yourself. For help compiling Openbox, please see our compiling guide.
Once Openbox is installed, running it is quite simple whether you log in through the graphical interface or through a text-based terminal. We'll first talk about the ways to run Openbox from a graphical log in (GDM/KDM), and then show how to run those same sessions from the command line.