User Feedback :: dsl-1.0rc2 "bugs"



gunnix,

the XPDF in DSL can only handle up to PDF 1.3 spec documents. Newer specs use different encoding.

OpenOffice creates PDF 1.4 docs, and I think the current spec is PDF 1.5 or 1.6.

Unfortunately, newer versions of XPDF need gtk2.x, and that's very fat.

as for your XMMS issue, most people prefer it over mpg123, so if you need an alternate filetype, it's not that hard to do. And I agree with your .wav filetype idea.

Emelfm-elm is signifcantly larger than our trimmed down version of EmelFM.

Our Dillo 0.7.3 is a customized version, with support for tabs and frames, and is still much better, faster, and renders just as well as the latest official Dillo. And it's smaller.

The MyDSLgui is written in Flua. The Flua language is rather obscure (which is sad, because it's so powerful) and as such, there is very little documentation for it. As Robert makes improvements to it, you can bet that they will be added in future releases. But I would think that the increased network actrivity shown in wmnet would be a dead giveayaw that ot's working.

The firefox config file is created the first time you run it, and is all the default settings. It does not exist on the CD, for space purposes, and so it cannot be changed.

and last but not least, the themes included on the CD are what the Devels have decided to be a nice mix of style (the simple, Biz-card, and Tree-and-moon themes), and size (Lawn, minimal) that will work on every computer. If you need extra eye-candy, grab some themes from the repository.


Now, for my bugs.

/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox is STILL not in the path! Typing a 20+ character string to start it is annoying!

Naim (nirc, et al) is a very old version! Newer versions support CTCP, file transfer, and has nyim (a yahoo messenger app) along with tons of bugfixes, and the same footprint.

There were several more, but I forgot them while I was typing that long responce >_<

-J.P.

ok thx for your reply saidunleashed, you do make some good points :)

*I thought xpdf didn't rely on gtk1 or gtk2 at all.
I don't seem to see that dependency on this page either:
http://packages.debian.org/testing/text/xpdf

But I see there's indeed a difference in space usage of more then 500KB between xpdf 1 and 3.


*I know that it's not hard to do and alternate filetype, at least I know that ;)
I'd also never ask to set mpg321 as default to open mp3. Just as alternate maybe?

In my opinion, if you are already in a gui (Xwindows -> Emelfm), then you should associate the filename with the graphical application (xmms). An alternative is no big deal to add, though.

On the other hand, mp3 association in a console filemanager (midnight commander) should be the console mp3 player.


I have been doing some scripting lately and have experienced the same problem with my scripts:  No progress bars

It is possible to display progress via a dialog / whiptail widget and probably a lua/fltk widget too but you need to feed the widget with an updated progress value.  In the worst case, a console window can also display progress.  The good old wget program has a console progress indicator.

But I have found an excellent solution to the problem.  It is a tiny little program called "pv" or Pipe Viewer.  This program is available in Debian testing and unstable and the entire package including docs is only 41k.  If you remove the docs and recompile with size optimizing you can probably get the whole thing down to under 20k compressed.

pv is awesome because it can display the progress of any piped data flow.  If it is invoked at the beginning of the pipe chain it can even figure out the "100% done" value automatically.  Otherwise, your script must provide this value if you want an accurate progress bar.

The other cool thing about this program is that it can supply feedback in a format that can be used by these widgets to display a graphical progress bar instead of a little text line inside a console window.  See the example used in this man page, it works with whiptail:

http://www.ivarch.com/programs/quickref/pv.shtml

FYI,

It is possible to use filename arguments that contain spaces and some other difficult characters in a script.

I haven't studied wordview (lua script), ppt or xls scripts enough to understand them but here is an example that worked for me in BASH.  It may not apply to other scripting languages:

Code Sample
#!/bin/bash
#
#  wordview   Rev0 2/5/05
#  originally submitted by cbagger01 from the DSL forum
#
antiword -p letter "$*" > /tmp/"$*".ps
gvu /tmp/"$*".ps
rm /tmp/"$*".ps
exit

Emelfm: trivial detail.
I'm logged in as root after a hard disc install, but elelfm still opens at /home/dsl.
Could it be changed to open in $HOME ?

Next Page...
original here.