The status of Mint Fluxbox CE

[Kendall]

I figured gedit was a given, but I'll look into TEA. I thought about leaving it out and using mousepad or nano under the presumption that basically anybody who feels they need gedit will go ahead and download it, but I thought twice. If TEA offers most of the same functionality I'll put it in and purge gedit.

I'm on GDM at the moment, and I've been considering SLiM but I'm not set on it at the immediate moment. This one will require some thought and some outside opinions.

I've made some good progress on the autogenerated menus since this morning. I don't have it dialed in yet, and I don't completely understand it, but I'm in a WAY better position than I was 24 hours ago (thanks both shane and ikey).

Also, I've pulled the installed system footprint down a couple hundred MB's since this morning after purging OpenOffice and doing some general system cleaning. I have a handful of folders to add, but not nearly to the extent of what I've removed. I don't plan on dropping any of the Java capabilities as I don't believe that would be suitably congruent to the philosophy behind Mint (though it HEAVILY affects the overall OS footprint).

I want to maintain an exceptional degree of functionality with this, as well as have it as visually appealing as possible. Trying to balance this with having a light-resource low-footprint OS is difficult, but I'll get it there. Thus far, the footprint is a little bit less than a typical full featured Debian based distro, but is lighter on resource usage. Also (completely subjective, and no offence to shane) this one is a bit prettier than FB CE 6.

[Kendall]

After a minute of thought:

Really what I'm trying to do here is create a lighter weight distro that has a smaller than average (for Fluxbox) learning curve, that is still as full featured as posssible. I'm completely willing to sacrifice some performance in favor of ease of use and complete function.

[Husse]

Gee - completely off topic but I first read the URL as suck.sourceforge

[Kendall]

@Husse: That's what I saw too. Pardon my mind always looking for the dirtier side of things.

Anyway. Instead of worrying with the menus like I have been, I put the Mint-FM2 packages in and made a few adjustments and everything seems to be fairly groovy on that end (mad props shane for doing a great job with that). I still have some organizing and cleaning to do. I've had some issues with ubiquity, but I think that has to do with the fact that I kept burning the same CD over and over again (going to use a fresh CD and see what happens). I made a few minor adjustments to the default theme from CE 6 (because I like it) but I'm going to experiment with a few others. I need to set a few more defaults, purge a few more packages, double check the ubiquity issue, and give her another good "once over" but hopefully I'll have a solid foundation to submit in the next week or so and we can start giving this thing some direction.

[exploder]

Sounds awesome Kendall!

[Husse]

exploder remind me to remind Clem about this project in a couple of days

[exploder]

Sure, be glad to.

[Kendall]

I'll take some screenshots later today when I start booting it into something other than VirtualBox.

[Kendall]

Went to the pub instead of working on this last night, anyway here's a screenshot:



What I NEED to do before I have it ready to send to you guys:
1. The "Quit" menu isn't working properly just yet, so I need to take a look at it (haven't started this yet).
2. I'm trying to get the wallpaper settings to work with Feh by default and be able to do so by right-clicking in Thunar.

Things that need to be done, that I'm avoiding thus far:
1. Icons in menus. I profoundly dislike icons in my Fluxbox menus so I'm avoiding this in hopes that someone else will do it.
2. General system cleaning. I've done a good bit of this, but there's always room for more.

[Kendall]

...also trying to get rid of Nitrogen without dependency issues.

[Kendall]

I've got the "Set as Wallpaper" option in Thunar defaulting the way I want it to. I'm using Feh instead of Nitrogen so the first time it starts it'll give you a prompt, but once you set the wallpaper once using Feh it should never prompt again. It'll also give a little more flexibility as to the location of the wallpaper image. Also, Feh is a ridiculously lightweight package. I'll take some screenshots of this tonight to give everyone an idea of what's going on.

I'm also unsure of how to handle the "Quit" menu. CE6 is the only Fluxbox experience I've ever had that used a window and asked what to do. Literally every other Fluxbox setup I've done just required a log out and gave shutdown/reboot/etc options from the log in screen. Expect some DM's from me later this week about this.

[Kendall]

Other things I've done:

fbrun instead of gmrun (fbrun has a "close" button, gmrun doesn't)
xterm instead of xfce4-terminal (any other terminal emulator is easily added, I think xterm is a good starting point)
Sylpheed as the default email client (once again, other stuff is easily added should it prove necessary)
Got rid of the Gnome version of XChat in favor of the generic one (should be fairly obvious)
Removed OpenOffice (entirely a space issue, also another "easily added" feature)


Things I'm considering:

Removing Totem (some things are dependent on mPlayer and two video players aren't terribly necessary I don't think)
Removing OpenJDK (Is it really necessary if Sun Java 6 is installed?)

[thx1138]

Decibel (http://decibel.silent-blade.org/) might be a better joice as the Gnome Music Player Client. Just my 2 cents.

[Kendall]

Gotta admit it looks good
I am worried however that gnome-system-monitor is there?
Anything with the label 'gnome' on it drags a ton of dependencies with it
Also, CrunchBang uses a Conky by default... just so you know
By the way, remove openjdk, gcj, gcj-*, and the java-aliases (not sure on package)
This will clear unneeded/unused clutter, and leave you with Sun Java 6 JRE

- Ikey Doherty

gnome-system-monitor is coming out. It's way easier for me to read than conky, so I've been using it personally. It's been a long (and educational) process learning package alternatives to some of the default Gnome stuff. I daresay that this has been the most extensive Fluxbox configuration I've ever done. People are usually happy with setting up a menu, a theme, some keybindings, and some startup apps, but you guys have pushed me to learn to do this better, more effectively, and more correctly. Also, openJDK is out as well, I did some reading and pulled it out yesterday afternoon.

[Kendall]

I was a little curious about TEA replacing gedit, but I'm actually quite impressed with TEA and it's about 3MB replacing over 16MB so yay!!!

[Kendall]

Decibel (http://decibel.silent-blade.org/) might be a better joice as the Gnome Music Player Client. Just my 2 cents.

Looking into this right now.

EDIT: Also need to put TEA on my default apps list as it isn't coming up in my "open with other application" menu.

[Kendall]

Here are some more screenshots showing a bit of what's going on. This is straight off the live CD as it sits at the moment. Note the difference in the "System Tools" menu when compared to Fluxbox CE6, and yes Mint-FM2 is generating all the menus:







I'm really digging Decibel and it's capabilities considering it's size. And let me once again state that I'm using fbrun instead of gmrun.

TEA isn't the most user friendly thing in the world until you get used to it. There's definitely a learning curve. I'm guessing most coders will already have an editor preference and will download what they want anyway, so it's good considering the size, but not nearly as intuitive as gedit or mousepad. TEA is definitely powerful, but I'm right now at a crossroads between power and intuitiveness.

Also (regarding stuff I haven't done yet), I can't figure out the "Quit" menu for the life of me. I'd love to figure it out, but I may comment it out and write in the standard Fluxbox Exit prompt, anyone feel free to enlighten me on this. In addition I haven't touched the menu icons at all, in any context.

EDIT: One last detail is that the .iso size is currently 640 MB. My personal acceptable upper limit for this project (considering the 613 MB for CE6) was at 650 MB. The number should come down a little bit more, but probably not a whole lot. The first .iso I burnt for this project was 1.2 GB so I feel like I'm doing pretty good.

[shane]

Hi Kendall,

I'm glad to see you are making a lot of progress!

I think we need to chat about the whole menu system and quit dialog so that I can explain the way I meant for it to work... and answer any questions you may have. I also see many ways it can be improved.

For a quick run down of the logic behind it, I wrote a wiki entry to explain in it some detail. http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php/Mint-fm2

Basically, the main bulk of the scripts parse the .desktop file(s) in /usr/share/applications and creates an entry for the Fluxbox menu. It then adds it to the autogenerated menu... or deletes it as need be. Then there are 2 small daemons whose basic task is to monitor the system for changes and triggers.

The daemons:

1. mfmrootdaemon - this monitors the system for new .desktop files or ones that are deleted in /usr/share/applications. That corresponds to installing or removing of an application. It then creates a trigger for the second daemon. The second part of this daemon detects triggers created by the quit dialog and performs the required actions that require root privileges... i.e. shutdown, reboot, etc

2. mfmuserdaemon - this detects the triggers created by the 1st daemon. The trigger basically tells this daemon which .desktop file to parse and add to the menu or which menu entry has to be removed.

Both daemons have to be running for the whole shebang to work. mfmrootdaemon is run by an init.d script. This may need to be changed because Ubuntu has switched to Upstart. mfmuserdaemon is run in the Fluxbox startup script.

The reason I set it up to use 2 daemons is so that a user can perform the quit dialog actions without entering an admin password by 'pre-assigning' the privileges to the daemon instead (running as root) and have the user only create the trigger. Having an independent daemon for each user means that each user can have his own custom menu without affecting other users' menus. Also, if user1 installs an application while user2 is not logged in, the trigger for user2 remains until user2 logs in... at which point his menu will be updated.

The configs for mint-fm2 are located in ~/.mint-fm2/mint-fm2.conf

I hope I've explained it enough for you to get it working... as many did not like the need for an admin password to shutdown, reboot, etc. If you need more explanations, just ask... I like explaining

You should be able to free up a lot of space by replacing GDM with Slim. GDM comes with a lot of Gnome deps. Slim will give you a faster boot time and a smaller RAM footprint.

Probably you would also like to implement the tweaks I had for the LiveCD... the ones that provide different modes in the LiveCD... Install only, Light desktop, Full desktop. They will help a lot for installation on machines with less than 256MB RAM. I got some heat from reviewers for Mint FB5 which required 256MB RAM to install... because once people see Fluxbox they want to install it on their ancient machines. But we can leave this for a later stage for now... it might need more explanations

[edit] Menu icons: Menu icons can be enabled or disabled in the mint-fm2 config file. The menu has to be regenerated after the setting has been changed. There is a simple enable/disable button in the Fluxbox version of mintDesktop.

[edit2] I chose gmrun over fbrun because of the saved history of previous commands and more importantly the autocomplete feature (by hitting TAB). Hitting Esc closes the gmrun dialog.

[shane]

This is the Fluxbox style I wanted to use in the next Mint FB version. It's based on the Metacity theme used in the Main edition. If you want, you can use it. http://www.linuxmint-art.org/content/sh ... ent=116436

[thx1138]

Nice style. Rounded Edges look better than the old style quadrangles.
Though i prefer Xfce in the Mint world i'm really excited about the Fluxbox edition.