Release Candidate: Linux Mint 5 Fluxbox CE RC1

[shane]

Hello Shane,
I would like to say great job on Mint Fluxbox!
Now to the issues I have encountered. I did see this in previous posts but wanted to still mention it, I was wondering why no volume control on task bar, not that it is a big deal since you can access this through the menu but it is a nice convenience. Keep in mind I am new to the Fluxbox GUI. Also I am not able to access my other hard drive on my PC. It is internal hard drive that I run Mint Main 5 on. Both drives are both SATA. I have run into this same issue with XFCE. The only work around I was given was to install another file manager. I was not happy with that suggestion. I do not feel I should have to do that since there is already Thunar. The last issue is I do not see much improvement in performance in Fluxbox over Mint XFCE CE. I will have to chock it up to the fact that you have some XFCE components installed along side Fluxbox, I was wondering if there is a Fluxbox alternative for these XFCE components?

Well thank you again for a great CE!

1. I have decided to add a volume control to the desktop (Wmix)

2. When you say Thunar cannot access your other hard drives, is this after you have mounted them? Or do you mean that it does not show up on the shortcuts as a hard drive? my machine only has one hard drive so I haven't met this. However, Thunar does recognize USB drives and the like when they are plugged in, and they appear in the shortcuts with mount/unmount options. Maybe you could try specifying during the installation or in /etc/fstab where your other hard drive should be mounted to... normally /media/sda1 or something similar. What you mention could be a limitation of Thunar... I am not sure.

3. Yes there are quite a few XFCE components included with Mint FB. This was done to give this edition as much 'full desktop functionality' as possible. You can turn off some services that you do not need like Wicd, blue tooth and the like using the System Tools>Services tool. also you can comment out unwanted applications in ~/.fluxbox/startup which will prevent other applications starting at boot. This will give you a decent bump in performance... As for other tools that could replace these XFCE components... I do not know of any set of GUI tools that will handle as many aspects of the system... There are the a whole host of command line tools though... which is what most minimalists would use along with config file editing...

I've got a few days that are more or less free so I will be pushing for a final release... Thanks for your suggestions... If you have got any more... please do let us know!

[merlwiz79]

Any other hard drive, other than the main, isn't automatically mounted and has to be put into fstab.
Not sure why Ubuntu did this but that's the new default.
Then you just have to use the folder in /media as a shortcut, in the sidepanel.

It's not that hard to do but shouldn't have to be done.
I have Ubuntu intrepid and it still doesn't automount anything but the main hard drive.
All USB drives are mounted when plugged in.
USB drives won't automount when plugged in while booting but you just have to right click to mount them.

These are both defaults from Ubuntu and doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon.

[mmesantos1]

Hello Shane,
I would like to say great job on Mint Fluxbox!
Now to the issues I have encountered. I did see this in previous posts but wanted to still mention it, I was wondering why no volume control on task bar, not that it is a big deal since you can access this through the menu but it is a nice convenience. Keep in mind I am new to the Fluxbox GUI. Also I am not able to access my other hard drive on my PC. It is internal hard drive that I run Mint Main 5 on. Both drives are both SATA. I have run into this same issue with XFCE. The only work around I was given was to install another file manager. I was not happy with that suggestion. I do not feel I should have to do that since there is already Thunar. The last issue is I do not see much improvement in performance in Fluxbox over Mint XFCE CE. I will have to chock it up to the fact that you have some XFCE components installed along side Fluxbox, I was wondering if there is a Fluxbox alternative for these XFCE components?

Well thank you again for a great CE!

1. I have decided to add a volume control to the desktop (Wmix)

2. When you say Thunar cannot access your other hard drives, is this after you have mounted them? Or do you mean that it does not show up on the shortcuts as a hard drive? my machine only has one hard drive so I haven't met this. However, Thunar does recognize USB drives and the like when they are plugged in, and they appear in the shortcuts with mount/unmount options. Maybe you could try specifying during the installation or in /etc/fstab where your other hard drive should be mounted to... normally /media/sda1 or something similar. What you mention could be a limitation of Thunar... I am not sure.

3. Yes there are quite a few XFCE components included with Mint FB. This was done to give this edition as much 'full desktop functionality' as possible. You can turn off some services that you do not need like Wicd, blue tooth and the like using the System Tools>Services tool. also you can comment out unwanted applications in ~/.fluxbox/startup which will prevent other applications starting at boot. This will give you a decent bump in performance... As for other tools that could replace these XFCE components... I do not know of any set of GUI tools that will handle as many aspects of the system... There are the a whole host of command line tools though... which is what most minimalists would use along with config file editing...

I've got a few days that are more or less free so I will be pushing for a final release... Thanks for your suggestions... If you have got any more... please do let us know!

Thank you for the info. I do not know much about Fstab so I do not think I will be making any changes there until I learn more about it. My other hard drive is a HDD 160GB internal Segate drive. But again thank you for the informative info.

[linuxviolin]

1) I did consider PCManFM. But contrary to what you suggested, Thunar does have more features than PCManFM.

Hmm.....

The most important being volume management, IMO.

Are you sure about that? I seem to remember having had no problem with that in PCManFM...

But also I suggest you look at XFE which is very good and lighter. "This file manager puts all others to shame." (quote from the web) http://roland65.free.fr/xfe
In addition, it has an text editor, a text viewer and an image viewer integrated, it knows use the .deb and .rpm packages and it is available in 18 languages...

# Integrated text editor (X File Write, xfw)
# Integrated text viewer (X File View, xfv)
# Integrated image viewer (X File Image, xfi)
# Integrated RPM or DEB packages viewer / installer / uninstaller (X File Package, xfp)

For its features see at http://roland65.free.fr/xfe/index.php?page=features

Excellent!

I know that in the main (GNOME) edition, XFE is used when you "Open as root" but why not use it completely/really? At least in the XFCE and Fluxbox editions...