UI update
Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: UI update
started by: reagent
Posted by reagent on Nov. 28 2005,04:24
wow. dont you think its time for a UI update? I really assumed this was coming with 2.0. Im still surprised that XFCE hasnt been used in this project...even an update of fluxbox would be nice (last update was in 0.51). Notice the much-improved tabs in the screenshot. With XFCE, you can still have lots of easy access icons without uglifying the desktop.
JMO , of course.
Posted by clivesay on Nov. 28 2005,12:43
It mainly all comes down to fitting in 50mb. Since DSL is now using JWM as a secondary WM I'm guessing that's the direction the Devs will move. I think this is the first screenshot I've seen with XFCE completely integrated into DSL with menus and such, nice work!
Chris
Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Nov. 28 2005,14:42
From my understanding, we will not be moving to using JWM as the default (ever), nor will we be putting in unneeded fluff, like XFCE.The current version of Fluxbox we use is small, relatively bug-free, and does what we want - managing windows, and looking good doing it. The newer versions of Fluxbox have a significant size increase for no real added functionality.
Even if a window manager change comes sometime in the future, it will be a change to something with an even smaller footprint, not larger.
-J.P.
Posted by reagent on Nov. 29 2005,00:50
I wonder if you know the total amount of space used by flux? This xfce package is not very big..but hey, DSL is an awesome project, and is fine as it is. I was just a little disappointed that 2.0 didnt have any radical change in X appearance.
Posted by mikshaw on Nov. 29 2005,04:24
Total amount of space used by fluxbox, uncompressed, in DSL is 720k.This includes the program, configuration files, styles, and background images.
That's a little more than half the size of the latest development fluxbox without any images or styles.
Posted by mikshaw on Dec. 01 2005,04:03
Although I'm a big fan of Fluxbox devel, I never really thought it was important enough to double the size of the package for the extra features, but i just thought of one argument for it...Fluxbox devel allows the use of an "include" tag in the menu, which means that the main menu and the mydsl menu can be completely separate files. This would allow the user to make arbitrary changes to the menu while a UCI file is mounted, then if the file is umounted the changes will not be overwritten by the temp menu.
| Code Sample |
| [include] (filename) Reads the file filename into the current menu. The file has to start with [begin] and end with [end]. The filename can be the full path to a file or it can begin with ~/, which will be expanded into your home directory (e.g. [include] (~/fluxbox/stylesmenu) will include /home/yourusername/fluxbox/stylesmenu in my menu). If the parameter to include directive is a directory, every file in this path will be included. |
Posted by roberts on Dec. 01 2005,05:05
menu includes would have/will make my life so much easier!I think jwm latest is doing that as well. Actually I was looking for a wm that would allow sym links in a directory to be used as a menu. That would be "the life of reily" for me. No rewrites, no includes, just add a sym link and remove a sym link.
I only found flwm and it uses the sym link style; but it is a little too sparse Also seems not be in development anymore.
Posted by mikshaw on Dec. 07 2005,05:17
Messing around with this a little I found that the fluxbox stable version in DSL actually does make use of the include tag. It doesn't use the directory path that is available in Fluxbox devel, but it will include a specific filename. Editing that included file for mydsl rather than the entire fluxbox menu may allow the user to have greater control of his personal menu, and possibly make adding and removing mydsl applications easier.EDIT: Since this thread concerns UI updates, I guess this would be an appropriate place to add that the mydslInfo text field is a serious mess. It uses the default flua font, which is apparently variable-width so the info files loaded into it look really bad. My suggestion is to edit mydslInfo.lua, line 45:
browser = Browser{0,0,500,400;textfont=15}
This will display the contents of the info files with a fixed font, so spaces and tabs are properly aligned.
Posted by phh on Dec. 07 2005,15:54
How small could an XFCE 4.2, GTK2, gFTP, etc... version of DSL be? Would it be close to 50MB or way off toward >100MB? Is it feasible?
Posted by cbagger01 on Dec. 07 2005,17:57
Take a loog at Feather Linux.It has stuff like that and it is over 100MB
Posted by roberts on Dec. 07 2005,18:53
While it is certainly possible to remaster DSL with Gtk2 and associated apps, its performance on older computers would not be as good. Same of 2.6 kernel. You would then have a smallish distro but not for smallish system. While there are other distros that may be smallish in terms of distro size, I believe DSL runs well on more of the smalish systems. We keep striving to make DSL not only small in distro size but to keep it using less hardware resources too.