The version of matchbox's panel and desktop programs in buildroot are pre-1.0.  The latest available from Matchbox's site are 2.0.  I tried to patch buildroot so that the 2.0 panel would build.  This required disabling dbus during the configure and patching the applets/Makefile.in to prevent the notify applet from building.  That applet requires dbus and the build doesn't work without special handling (which I hadn't been able to figure out yet) to use the dbus installed by buildroot in the target directories.

Once I got the 2.0 panel built I launched it under qemu, along with the updated 2.0 desktop.  The desktop turned out to be a big app under the xterm window I also launch at startup.  And the panel didn't seem to show up anywhere or maybe was there but I didn't see it cuz it was offscreen or something.  So there is some work to be done to get the 2.0 apps working under buildroot for beaglebox.

Switching back to the 0.9 series for Matchbox apps I tested that the orientation setting for the panel works.  It does.  So the question is now whether to apply patches to panel 0.9.3 or try to update to 2.0.  I looked at openembedded and they're still using the 0.9.3 version of the panel as well.  I noticed some older posts about matchbox-panel-2 (via google) but it isn't clear if those are the ones that should be worked on.

Matchbox doesn't appear to have much active development so I'm wondering if I should fork it and build my own desktop/window manager tools for BeagleBox that are based on the 0.9 series of Matchbox.  The nice thing about that is that the code is relatively easy to follow and fairly simplistic.  It's like starting with a window manager template.  I wouldn't want to tick off the Matchbox folks, of course.  I should probably check with them on the status of that project.