Linux Mint 6 Fluxbox CE Suggestions/Wishlist/Discussion

[shane]

Hi all!

The time has come to begin work on the Felicia Fluxbox edition, so I started this thread to get some suggestions from you the users as to what you wish to see in the next version. I will evaluate all the suggestions and choose the ones that are feasible and in the best interest of the general user base. So please don't be mean if your suggestion isn't chosen I can't please everyone!

The following are my main subjects of interest:

1. Quite a few people were sour about the fact that Elyssa Fluxbox wasn't lighter. I think this is a valid point and I will try to make the next release even lighter without sacrificing from the desktop user experience. My plan to achieve this is as follows:

- use Slim instead of GDM. Many suggested this. I have studied how Slim works and I think I can pull it off and keep other aspects of Mint that depend on GDM working fine.

- I will try to implement a feature that will allow the Live CD to boot into an 'installation only' mode without a full desktop environment. Hopefully this should cater for the lower end machines that do not have a swap partition.

- I am toying with the idea of having 2 web browsers. Firefox, I think, is a must have on any OS. But to cater for machines that need a lighter browser, I am thinking of including one. Kazehakase is my current light browser of choice. What do you think about having 2 browsers?

- I will try to see how well PCManFM works as the main file manager. Some ppl have asked for this. I like Thunar a lot as you can do a lot with it. For one, the user custom actions (the extra tools you have when you right click on a file or folder) are a very handy thing to have and I don't think PCManFM has this feature. Also this is something we share with the XFCE edition and so we benefit from merlwiz's skills for almost no extra work.

- I would really like to reduce the dependency on XFCE and Gnome tools for system configuration. If you know of any other set of configuration tools please mention them. They should be under active development and preferably with a debian repository (even better if its ubuntu). Ideally it would be great to write our own configuration tools. However, I do not have the coding expertise to do this. If you are willing to work on this please let me know. I have some ideas... which use python and glade.

2. Software selection. I would like to know what you think about the default software in the Elyssa release. More especially I am interested in:

- MPD+GMPC versus a more conventional player. I like audacious but I would really like to stick to GTK applications. I think it gives a good impression to have all applications looking the same. Consonance ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/consonance/ ) seems like a viable alternative to MPD. However, MPD is the undisputed winner of the lightweight music players. What do you think?

- Office suite. Do Abiword + Gnumeric statisfy your office task needs? Would you rather have OpenOffice 3? OO3 is obviously much heavier than the current apps but it is a more complete suite. I prefer Abiword + Gnumeric... but what do you think? Also, is there a good lightweight application for creating presentations? I think it would be a useful addition. A standards compliant application would be ideal.

- The FF3 plus a light browser point I mentioned above.

3. I am working on an all new menu system that will have localization support and a better icon searching algorithm. And hopefully I can get it to run lighter than the current version. What is your opinion of the current menu? Is there anything that can be improved?

4. The artwork for Felicia hasn't yet been finalized... but I would like to get some feedback and suggestions about the current Fluxbox style and GTK theme and also what you would like to see in the Felicia release. Looking good is important

That about covers what I wanted to discuss... If there is anything else concerning the Felicia Fluxbox release, you can bring it up. Please be clear and concise in you responses

cheers.

[Caraibes]

Ok for 2 browsers.

Use PCManFM, Leafpad, Mirage, Aterm... No GDM (-how about login in with startx ?)

Too bad you can't find a way to offer a text-based install (alternate iso)...

Volume control with Alsamixer in Aterm... Works just fine...

-Do Abiword + Gnumeric statisfy your office task needs?
-Yes, on an older PC... If I need more stuff, such as a powerpoint clone, I'll just apt-get Oo.org... But it shouldn't be on the iso...

I should (finally) download and test-drive Mint Fluxbox... Right now I am on Mint64, with Fluxbox installed, but of course it is not the same...

Anyway, let me take advantage of that thread to congratulate you for your good work !

[linuxviolin]

Use PCManFM, Leafpad, Mirage, Aterm..

In place of PCManFM maybe I would prefer XFE. e.g You can want to read this post about XFE

About Mirage, why not, but for simply to see images, GPicView is excellent as an image viewer!

And why not rather Sakura or LXTerminal in place of Aterm? There is also ROXTerm...

About Leafpad, definitively YES!

About AlsaMixer I agree with Caraibes but for a "lightweight music player" I prefer and use AlsaPlayer.

If I need more stuff, such as a powerpoint clone, I'll just apt-get Oo.org

Yes. Abiword and Gnumeric... hmm suck.

Also MPlayer is ok but why not VLC? Even the Mozilla plugin works quite/perfectly well.

[Caraibes]

...maybe I would prefer XFE.

I am ok for Xfe as well... As a matter of fact, I realise it is in Mint, and it feels very light... Sold...

About Mirage, why not, but for simply to see images, GPicView is excellent as an image viewer!

Fine, but let's try to compare the pros and cons of both... It was my understanding that Mirage was a bit lighter...

And why not rather Sakura or LXTerminal in place of Aterm? There is also ROXTerm...

I am biased towards Aterm, as it is the one I always use in Fluxbox... What would the others do better than Aterm (Aterm is the lightest of them all...)

About AlsaMixer I agree with Caraibes but for a "lightweight music player" I prefer and use AlsaPlayer.

AlsaPlayer looks fine... Does it work like Xmms ?

Yes. Abiword and Gnumeric... hmm suck.

Ok, but do we want to have OOo in a Fluxbox distro by default ?

Also MPlayer is ok but why not VLC? Even the Mozilla plugin works quite/perfectly well.

I enjoy VLC... As a matter of fact, I always add both VLC and Mplayer since I started using Linux... As of the Firefox plugin, Mplayer seems to be better...

-What's your take about "no login manager"... startx, as a Slackware style ?
-Lighter, no ?

-What's your take on a "alternate" install ?

[exploder]

I would like to see Splashy used instead of Usplash. Splashy works better with low spec machines and it shows up properly on shut down. Usplash does not show up right on shutdown in the Fluxbox CE or the Xfce CE.

I like the idea of using Slim, I have used it before and it is light and does a good job. Abiword and Gnumeric would be good choices for office apps, OpenOffice can be added after the install if it is desired.

[linuxviolin]

It was my understanding that Mirage was a bit lighter...

I read somewhere (sorry but my memory fails to me) it was the opposite, GPicView would be lighter than Mirage. But maybe this was a wrong information...

(Aterm is the lightest of them all...)

Yes Aterm is good but in fact RXVT seems still lighter, at least on my system. But the others I mentioned in my previous post have some perhaps interesting possibilities like tabs, which may be something interesting/useful.

Also maybe Tilda is not absolutely useful nor necessary. It can serve and is interesting, as Yakuake in KDE, but it is not so light nor really necessary.

AlsaPlayer looks fine... Does it work like Xmms ?

It's very simple and light. Add your files in the playlist, click play and listen. A no bloated app, it does simply what one ask it: play music, period. And if you really want there are even some visualisations... I like it.

About AlsaMixer, I guess that rather than use the terminal it might be wiser to use Alsamixergui, it's not much heavier but is a little more friendly.

Ok, but do we want to have OOo in a Fluxbox distro by default ?

Maybe not, of course...

As of the Firefox plugin, Mplayer seems to be better...

Maybe yes... but can you clarify please? Now I'm in Parsix and for now I have no problem with the vlc plugin.

What's your take about "no login manager"... startx, as a Slackware style ?
-Lighter, no ?

-What's your take on a "alternate" install ?

startx? No problem!
Yes, lighter but it may surprise some people, especially in the Mint "customers". The Mint audience is not the same than Slackware.

About a "alternate" install, I am not opposed but there too it is perhaps not what someone coming to Mint looks for, but it is true that even in a distro "accessible and easy" one must satisfy the more geeks among us

I forgot: I have never used Grip but rather why not Asunder? It is very/quite good and Grip is for Gnome, right? Asunder is independent of any
desktop environment and I guess it has more encoders "to save tracks from an Audio CD": WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, and/or Wavpack.

[merlwiz79]

Using PCManFM or XFE, their would be no mintUpload.

The latest Vlc now requires qt4 to be installed, which will add almost 100MBs more to the live cd.

I'm not sure if you can remove gdm without removing a lot of other required software.
Even then slim wouldn't let us run mintAssistant amd mintDesktop PostLogin, like gdm does.

Usplash works fine here just like it does in Xubuntu.

The alternate install iso would be very difficult to make.
I'm not sure if it could be done without redoing a lot of work already done.

[shane]

Thanks for the suggestions! Let me try to recap.

- File manager: For me Thunar still seems to be the better option for the *general user base*. merlwiz mentioned the point about mintUpload. This being Linux Mint, we have to have it. But I was wondering would it be possible to run mintUpload using a stand alone interface so we can free it from Thunar? Maybe using a zenity dialogue?

As for the other file managers, XFE looks like a good file manager, but it does not use GTK and brings along with it the fox libraries. It will not go with the rest of the applications and will stick out like a sore thumb. PCManFM installed from the Hardy repos seems to have some kind of memory leak. I have it running for some time now and memory usage is reaching 40MB! There are some other file managers I would like you to test... they are tux commander and gnome commander. They are pretty geeky and for starters they do not use the system default icon theme. This, for me, is a big minus. It just takes away from the polished feeling of the distro.

Thunar interestingly is not so bad on resource usage! Just install all the file managers and use them for a while... and monitor RAM use. Thunar is not bad at all for all the bells and whistles it has. The only down side I think would be some XFCE dependencies. But since we use other XFCE tools they might be needed anyway. I am still leaning towards Thunar.

- GPicView is lighter than Mirage. The only advantage of Mirage that I can see is the thumbnail previews and I don't think this is enough reason to change.

- Terminal emulators: Again I go back to the GTK theme. Aterm is very light and fast, but that scroll bar is not a pretty sight. I think the polished look of the distro is not something we should compromise on. The other visual eye candy we have in Aterm is already provided in xfce4-terminal. Sakura, on the other hand, uses GTK, is faster to load than xfce4-terminal, it supports tabs and is lighter than xfce4-terminal. This may be a viable option. I will have to see how its dependencies fit in with the rest of the system. Please install it and use it and let me know how it is in comparison to the xfce4-terminal. Any other terminals in mind? GTK use is a must.

Tilda... this was an addition purely out of my own selfishness But I really like the way I have it set up. If you run it you will notice that it runs docked at the top of the screen. Pressing F1 hides/unhides it. And if you run it at startup, a terminal is instantly available at the stroke of a key. Its just a convenience that I like having. I can remove it if that is the general consensus.

- Volume control: I think having a pretty graphical interface is necessary. Alsamixer is available by default if you wish to use it. Alsamixergui does not use GTK. I think there are some other GTK volume controls available. I will look into that also. I will also try to get PulseAudio working for the next release since that is the direction of the rest of the Linux world.

- Text editor: Is there any advantage of Leafpad over Mousepad? Mousepad is what Xubuntu uses and so it will get more developer attention... which means less bugs for us. Personally, I need syntax highlighting and so I use Gedit. TEA editor is lighter that Gedit and it has syntax highlighting... but the interface is kind of unconventional.

- Office: I suppose we are in agreement over Abiword + Gnumeric...

- Of all the FF media plugins available in the Ubuntu repos, the Mplayer one seems to work the best. I am not a big fan of Mplayer myself... In fact, I wanted to use Totem in Elyssa, but having *all* online media working is something that we at Linux Mint consider an absolute must. Anything less and it doesn't get past exploder And those Apple trailers are quite a pain...

I think one single video player is enough for a distro and as a video player, Mplayer does perform well. The interface is a bit awkward but that is solved easily.

- Music player: I think in this day and age where music is largely digital, having a player that has a library feature is essential. Neither Alsaplayer nor XMMS provide this. When it comes to being light, I am yet to find a player that is as light as MPD. MPD has a proper library and searching functions. GMPC is simply a frontend and can be closed without interrupting playback. MPD uses about 1-2MB which is phenomenal... but it only plays files that are present in the library. This, I think is its only shortcoming. Have you tried Consonance?

- Login manager: Having no login manager will take away a lot from this edition. It simply isn't elegant and is not an option. As for Slim, it is possible to run a script as root when a user logs in. This is what is required by the other Mint tools. I am not sure if Slim has an auto login feature. This is something many people use and it is now an option the LiveCD installer. Using Slim would mean that would be broken. I will have to see how it all works together. If it is not possible, I guess GDM it is.

- I am not sure how the alternate installer works, but I think it is way different compared to the LiveCD installer. It would simply be too much work. Having the installer run alone without any other application is a more feasible route for older machines.

- Boot splash: This is the first time I heard about Splashy. I tried to google for some performance comparisons between Splashy and Usplash... or comparisons for low spec machines... but I couldn't find any. Exploder, do you have any links?

[EDIT] I just realized there would be a problem that would be caused by using Splashy instead. The grub menu.lst file that the installer creates will be broken since it creates it for Usplash. We will have to change the way the installer creates this file. So the change really has to be worth the work put into it... [/EDIT]

- CD ripping: Asunder looks like a very good application. I went with Grip because it was the lightest one I found. I forget the name of the one which the XFCE edition uses... I will have to reevaluate all 3 and choose one. Thanks for the suggestion. (I know I am guilty of breaking my own 'GTK rule' with Grip but it's only the bottom part )

Thanks linuxviolin and Caraibes for contributing. I am sorry if I sound consistently negative but I really want to this edition to keep up with the high standard that Linux Mint has set. The elegance of the distribution and the user experience is something I do not want to compromise on. I value your contribution a lot and I do appreciate your interest. I am just putting forward my own arguments and the topics are still open for discussion.

cheers.

P.S. PCManFM is now using 85MB RAM

[linuxviolin]

memory usage is reaching 40MB!

P.S. PCManFM is now using 85MB RAM

If it's the case then the Ubuntu package is... bad! I'm not on a Mint box now but here with a Debian package and in Gnome I have 28/29 MB RAM!

XFE looks like a good file manager, but it does not use GTK and brings along with it the fox libraries. It will not go with the rest of the applications and will stick out like a sore thumb.

OK it's not GTK but Fox librairies are very light and XFE is not ugly, right? And XFE is a such good file manager (it can even use the .deb and .rpm packages. Just right-click on a package and choose View, Install/Update or Uninstall and the work is done! Yes we have Mintinstall but if you download a package from the web this function is very interesting) that we should not use it just because it is not GTK? Without to mention xfw, xfv, xfi... Maybe yes, Thunar "is not bad at all" about RAM use but I guess XFE is still better.

they do not use the system default icon theme. This, for me, is a big minus. It just takes away from the polished feeling of the distro.

OK but again XFE is ugly? Really? And maybe it is possible to give it "a Mint look"...

But I was wondering would it be possible to run mintUpload using a stand alone interface so we can free it from Thunar?

Very good if you can do this!

Sakura, on the other hand, uses GTK, is faster to load than xfce4-terminal, it supports tabs and is lighter than xfce4-terminal. This may be a viable option. I will have to see how its dependencies fit in with the rest of the system.

Sakura is quite very good, has "fewer dependencies" and "For people that already know GNOME 2 terminal, Xfce4 terminal and are
searching for a lighter but comparable replacement, sakura might be the answer"

But LXTerminal is good also and with no problem of dependencies: "LXterminal is a VTE-based terminal emulator from LXDE project which supports multiple tabs. It is completely desktop-independent and does not have any unnecessary dependencies. In order to reduce memory usage and increase the performance, all instances of the terminal are sharing a single process." Here in Gnome LXTerminal uses 22/24 MB RAM

Idem I guess for ROXTerm: "ROXTerm is a terminal emulator intended to provide similar features to gnome-terminal, based on the same VTE library, but with a smaller footprint and quicker start-up time. It achieves this by not using the GNOME libraries and by using a separate applet to provide the configuration GUI. It can be used as a ROX application, as the name implies, or in any other X environment." Here in Gnome ROXTerm uses 24/26 MB RAM

Please install it and use it and let me know how it is in comparison to the xfce4-terminal.

I use Sakura in another distro in Gnome, it uses here 21/24 MB RAM
I have not xfce4-terminal here, sorry.

Sakura and LXTerminal are about also light one than the other but LXTerminal sometimes is a little bit lighter than Sakura (20/21 MB vs 21/23 MB)
But RXVT uses only 5/6 MB RAM! And Aterm 12/13 MB RAM...

By comparison, gnome-terminal uses 41/42 MB RAM and even sometimes still more, it's crazy!

Any other terminals in mind?

As I say above: LXTerminal, ROXTerm... Light and, I guess, no problem about dependencies... And relatively nice/pretty

About Tilda, it is "sympathic" and interesting... I use it too in Gnome but in a Fluxbox distro, is it really necessary? If "you run it at startup" you add some charge, though not much but here 58 MB RAM

I will also try to get PulseAudio working for the next release since that is the direction of the rest of the Linux world.

If it were for me, I would prefer to stay with Alsa...

Mplayer does perform well. The interface is a bit awkward but that is solved easily.

And SMPlayer? OK it uses QT4 but...

And those Apple trailers are quite a pain..

Yes! But you thought to Totem?

having a player that has a library feature is essential.

Hmm, I never use and I do not need of this *kind of thing*...

Have you tried Consonance?

Sorry but no.

Is there any advantage of Leafpad over Mousepad?

Hmm and what about the contrary? Is there any advantage of Mousepad over Leafpad? And we should have less XFCE dependencies...

less bugs for us.

Leafpad is not really very buggy

Thanks linuxviolin and Caraibes for contributing. I am sorry if I sound consistently negative but I really want to this edition to keep up with the high standard that Linux Mint has set. The elegance of the distribution and the user experience is something I do not want to compromise on. I value your contribution a lot and I do appreciate your interest. I am just putting forward my own arguments and the topics are still open for discussion.

negative? No problem, maybe but it is always good to see a maintainer to be open to the others... It's not always the case.

[wrender]

Gui for changing wallpapers ...


http://wallpabox.tuxfamily.org/

[Zwopper]

My tip is to take a look at how Absolute Linux has solved some of these issues.
Absolute is however based on Slackware, but on the other hand the goal here is to find apps/solutions that work, and I think that Absolute has come a long way here.
Why not download an iso and take it for a spin in Virtualbox.
I got Absolute to behave rather snappy on an old IBM X600 Thinkpad (pentium 3 - 600MHz with 128MB RAM)
Then of course there's SliTaz - also VERY fast and lightweight, maybe there's a good idea or two in there as well...
And as for music players there is a vast diversity to chose from, Goggles Music Manager for instance

[Caraibes]

I agree with the above post. However, the main problem would be the iso itself (being a live-cd)... Also the Gnome dependencies needed for GDM... And some of the "ram greedy" Mint tools...

[Zwopper]

I agree with the above post. However, the main problem would be the iso itself (being a live-cd)... Also the Gnome dependencies needed for GDM... And some of the "ram greedy" Mint tools...

SliTaz is a live-cd though...

[exploder]

How about adding a GUI for Conky?

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/ ... n=83029507

[marcus0263]

Since Fluxbox is a very low overhead WM and works well on older box's the sensible thing would be to have an option for a command line install. Or at the very utmost least just an ncurses terminal install without having to go into the Live CD.

[Guestman]

And as for music players there is a vast diversity to chose from, Goggles Music Manager for instance

No no no, please not a google thing! With the doubts on the user privacy about Chrome for example, not Google again!

[Zwopper]

And as for music players there is a vast diversity to chose from, Goggles Music Manager for instance

No no no, please not a google thing! With the doubts on the user privacy about Chrome for example, not Google again!

OK!
How about...
You know it's goGGle, not gOOgle...

[Guestman]

And as for music players there is a vast diversity to chose from, Goggles Music Manager for instance

No no no, please not a google thing! With the doubts on the user privacy about Chrome for example, not Google again!

OK!
How about...
You know it's goGGle, not gOOgle...

Would you say that it is not Google? OK, but the homepage is http://code.google.com/p/gogglesmm/. code gOOgle.com! So what about?

[TeeLicht]

Hi,

First of all, I have to admit that I never ran the Mint Fluxbox edition on my Laptop. Anyways, I think, I might have some suggestions for the next release. All of these do not depend on Gnome/XFCE libs.

Foto Application: In addition to a small/efficient pic viewer, you could include Fotoxx (http://kornelix.squarespace.com/fotoxx/) or IntiPunku (http://intipunku.blogspot.com/) for providing basic foto editing capabilities.
Music Application: As an Alternative to the MPD clients, I would suggest GMusicBrowser (http://squentin.free.fr/gmusicbrowser/gmusicbrowser.html; default in Zenwalk), which can make use of the MPlayer backend.
Screenshot Tool: Gscrot (http://www.linuxine.com/2008/07/gscrot-screenshot-tool-for-gnome-environment.html)
Editor: Geany (http://www.geany.org/Main/About)
System Profiler: Hardinfo http://hardinfo.berlios.de/HomePage
Task Management: Osmo http://clay.ll.pl/osmo/ or Dayplanner http://www.day-planner.org/index.php
CD burning: Recorder http://code.google.com/p/recorder/
Password Management: Figaro's http://als.regnet.cz/fpm2/
Email: ClawsMail is maybe a bit more advanced than Sylpheed and can make use of .png icons nowadays (such as: http://xlife.zuavra.net/index.php/97/)
Process Manager: LXTask is basically XFCETask without XFCE dependencies.
Browser: Midori

I agree that Absolute Linux provides some basic configuration solutions but there is a gtk2 version of the Sidux control center - this could be easily ported maybe.

Of course a custom kernel (something like the "Zen" kernels you can find in the Gentoo/Ubuntu forums) could provide a major speed advantage but would in turn mean a lot of additional work and maybe conflicts with the default repos.

[shane]

thanks TeeLicht for the suggestions... I will look into them ... I still think we should stick to GTK apps to maintain the overall feel of the distro. I havent looked at your suggestions yet.

I will be leaving tomorrow so I will not be as active on the forums for about a month... I will try to check whats happening as often as I can.

Keep the suggestions coming in.... please try to keep them GTK centric... I will try to work on Mint FB 6 as much as I can... I am taking my laptop with... and I have almost got the next version of the menu ready. I have to figure out how I will write the updating scripts... I like the way it has turned out... at idle so far it uses a tenth of the RAM compared to the current version.

cheers.