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Installing X (Fluxbox) on Debian

I decided to use fluxbox, because it is light, and has all I need to work on my laptop, it the window manager that DSL uses, and I like DSL .

sudo aptitude install fluxbox

Now install the X-server

sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg

OK now we should have Fluxbox up and running, lets go for the basing menus, copy the default menu example to be your first menu

sudo cp /etc/X11/fluxbox/system.fluxbox-menu /etc/X11/fluxbox/fluxbox-menu

And copy the default user menu to your own Home directory to be your first fluxbox menu

cp /etc/X11/fluxbox/fluxbox.menu-user $HOME/.fluxbox/menu

Add X-term

I know you want to start fluxbox, but we need two more things to be able to start working in a GUI environment, the first thing is to install Xterm

sudo aptitude install xterm

Then add it to the Fluxbox menu, read how to add programs to Fluxbox menu to know how to do it.

Note that we have not installed KDM, GDM or XDM so we will have to start GUI in the old way

startx

If you do not want this, you can install gdm, or xdm, or kdm as you prefer, I want to keep this installation really light.
Beautifying the Desktop

Before installing the applications, lets make our Desktop a little bit more “eyecandy” if this word can be used, we will install conky which is one of my favorite applications in DSL, be sure to have own_window option to “no”, for it to appear directly on your Desktop, as it do on DSL

To make Conky start each time you log into Fluxbox, add this line to $HOME/.fluxbox/startup

conky &

be sure it to appear before this other line

exec /usr/bin/fluxbox

Install fonts

In case of error

apt-get install --reinstall xfonts-base

Source:http://www.go2linux.org/installing-a-light-linux-operating-system-debian-fluxbox