The status of Mint Fluxbox CE

[Kendall]

@shane: I've about got the menu system figured out. I read the wiki article a couple of times a few days ago before I decided to use the mint-fm2 packages instead of building my own. I have had to make some very slight adjustments to a few things to get everything to work right, but it's coming along nicely at this point.

I think I get what you've got going on for the "quit" dialog and I'm going to screw with it some tomorrow. If I can't get it situated, I'll shoot you a DM tomorrow afternoon. I'll give Slim a good look tomorrow as well.

I'm not going to use the live CD tweaks (Full Desktop, Light Desktop, Installer only) as I'm using remastersys instead of reconstructor and it gives you a boot menu right after the bios letting you pick between running live or booting straight into the installer amongst other things (also very nice option of bypassing the live CD and booting straight into the hard drive, which is awesome for me right now).

I'm still a day or two out on trying to screw with the menu icons.

Thanks a million for everything.

[paolone]

Hello !
I'm not a developer...I'm only a distro hopper...
I have to see the screenshot of the new Fluxbox ce...I think it can become the perfect notebook distro.
Please don't remove the scim input method ...I need it...
Is possible to test some alpha o beta ?

Tanks for all !

Paolone

[Kendall]

"Quit" is working. Menu icons are working. For some twisted, unusual reason the menu reverts back to it's original state (including some things that aren't in the /usr/share/applications/ folder anymore) every time it starts up. I'm looking into either a fix or a workaround for this. If anyone has any thoughts, please let me know.

@paolone: SCIM is still in there, don't worry.

[shane]

For some twisted, unusual reason the menu reverts back to it's original state (including some things that aren't in the /usr/share/applications/ folder anymore) every time it starts up.

If you can archive the contents of ~/.mint-fm2 and ~/.fluxbox and attach them, I might be able to help. Also a source package of your modified mint-fm2 if you changed anything there.

[Kendall]

@shane: The only changes I made to the mint-fm2 package was I removed the "install" option from the base menu toward the bottom of "rootgen" file as ubiquity is still present after a clean install. It still comes up in the "System Tools" menu, but that's unavoidable. Also, I added a script to the /etc/rc2.d/ folder to get the "Quit" dialogue working. I'm not sure how this would affect this particular issue, but it's there nonetheless.

I'll pack up everything as soon as I get to the computer where I'm working on everything.

[merlwiz79]

You need to take a live cd and use mintconstuctor or it won't work for other people.
Also every change needs to be done by debian package.

[Kendall]

You need to take a live cd and use mintconstuctor or it won't work for other people.
Also every change needs to be done by debian package.

I'm doing EVERYTHING via debian packages after testing via remastersys, so that much is taken care of.

Remastersys works perfectly fine for other people if used in the "dist" mode. One of the primary reasons I'm using it now instead of moving to mintconstructor is the fact that it gives a straight installer option after the bios instead of having to add additional files to the distro in order to accommodate less than spectacular situations involving RAM (as Fluxbox versions of anything are wont to do). It's familiar to me as well as I've done a few Fluxbox builds this way before (but never to this extent). The biggest downside to remastersys is that it can make some people lazy in that you can push a distro without having to do anything outside of some basic configuration, as remastersys doesn't necessitate .deb package manipulation like a lot of other live CD software (intentionally or otherwise, I have no idea). Basically remastersys and reconstructor/mintconstructor aren't better or worse than each other, they just tend to favor different development styles (that, and I get a wicked cool bootup menu).

What I'm doing with Fluxbox on top of Mint 8 is every bit as much of a learning experiment as it is a hopeful OS distribution. I'm trying to nail as much of this as I can by myself before seeking any type of assistance for several reasons, the most of which is my own personal education when dealing with stuff like this. My passion for anything is figuring out how it works and (eventually) how to improve upon it. Right now I have exactly two goals: (1) Make an awesome Fluxbox distro using Mint 8 for the groundwork; and (2) learn every possible thing I can while I'm doing it.

I plan on pushing the first .iso through to the Mint team for feedback/suggestions/love/hate before I finish polishing off some of the "more messed with" packages (trying to cut out as many man-hours as possible). Right now, the .iso is 98% of everything I could imagine in a great distro, but that only accounts for me, not everyone else and their personal needs, and not Mint with its great reputation for great things.

I'm doing every I can to push this project as far as I can, I just hope that the Mint devs are ok with what I've done.

[shane]

@merlwiz: welcome back! haven't seen you around in a while

@Kendall: I think you are doing well at least from a learning stand point and that is very good... I don't want to be a party pooper but I promise there will be a lot more work to do once internal testing begins. Exploder, our internal tester is very thorough and particular with every release. He keeps the team on our toes and maintains the high quality that people have come to expect from Mint.

Packages like Ubiquity, casper, etc should be uninstalled automatically at the end of the installation process. mintConstructor does this for you. Doing this manually will be quite a hassle... it involves updating the manifest files on the LiveCD during each build.

I'm anxious to see your work

[Kendall]

I'm getting the swing of mintConstructor, though it'll probably set me back a few days (not too long though). There are a couple of things I need to mess around with a bit more before I get completely comfortable with it, but it's working out nicely. I stripped a Mint 8 Stable iso down to about 550 MB and I'm putting it back together from there using my remastersys builds and CE 6 as detailed blueprints.

@shane: I'm really looking forward to Exploder's nitpicking.

[Kendall]

I'm shutting it down until Sunday or Monday. I'll be too busy this weekend to be effective, so I'd rather work on it without other things pressuring me.

[Kendall]

SLiM is in. I kept the CE6 theme but changed the background to the "Fresh" image from Helena. It looks wicked cool.

Shiki style is in. Elfin2 style is out.

I messed with some dependencies to prevent nitrogen from being automatically installed when the Fluxbox related Mint packages are installed.

I have a 3 mile laundry list of packages I need to check for relevance. I think most of them are just Gnome dependencies that haven't been cleaned up yet, but we'll see.

She's looking pretty good. More info later.

[Husse]

Clem is anxious to see an ISO of this
You can contact him at root at linuxmint.com

[Kendall]

Clem is anxious to see an ISO of this
You can contact him at root at linuxmint.com

I have a little more work to do before I feel comfortable sending this to you guys, but expect something in the next few days. Hopefully Friday at the latest.

[Kendall]

Debating keeping the Oxygen-Refit 2 icon theme. I think it works particularly good with the Shiki-Wise theme and I don't see any reason (other than change for the sake of change) to mess with it. If there are objections to this, please inform me very soon. Also, if there are no objections, I'm going to reduce the font size of the shiki theme just a touch.

I've got the system cleaned out pretty good at the moment. I took about three hours today and purged packages that really didn't seem to have any business here.

On another note, I've been screwing around with a version of the mint-fm2 package where I'm giving regular users password-free access to the shutdown commands and using ciao to execute them. This version seems (to me) way less complicated than the other one. We'll see.

[Kendall]

I've come to what I believe is a reasonable compromise with the mint-fm2 package, now at version 1.18, that works with the current linux system and former linux systems as well. It's not perfect, but everything works, and I believe that with this solution everything will continue to work with future versions of the distro.

The last big issue is getting the default gtk settings I'd like to load on the live CD and initially upon install. Admittedly it's not hard to correct, but it's still just a tad annoying at this point. I'm working on this part next.

EDIT: I think I just figured out how to fix this. The default wallpaper/background is still an issue in the live CD and upon initial startup. I'm using feh instead of nitrogen and I put together a custom command to work with feh for setting wallpapers in Thunar, but in the live CD and upon initial install it still needs someone to physically set a wallpaper/background before it's completely happy. Honestly I'm perfectly OK with this due to the resources saved by using feh, but I'm curious as to how Clem, Husse, and Exploder will take this (really, it's not a big issue, but I realise there may be another script that needs to be written to eliminate this issue). I added the wallpapers that come with Mint 8 to the mint-artwork-fluxbox package to make this WAY easy.

[Kendall]

The default wallpaper bug is fixed. Working on getting the default gtk theme, icon theme, and font size dialed in. Also I need to check to make sure the menus have no broken links, and for some reason the terminal icon in the menu isn't working. I need to get these taken care of and run some new md5's for the updated packages, then I think we're good.

[Kendall]

Default GTK theme = FIXED
Default Icon theme = FIXED
Default font size = FIXED
Terminal Icon bug = FIXED
Broken Links in Menu = FIXED
New md5's created = I'll try to get to this at some point this evening.

[Kendall]

Uh oh Somebody didn't pay attention to a previous post of mine

I ended up taking an easier route. In the /etc/skel/ folder I added a "lastwallpaper" file with the default wallpaper data. Everytime feh is used to change the background, the "lastwallpaper" file is automatically updated to reflect the change. Easy and effective.

Turns out you posted while I was editing this (had the window open for ages, literally ages..)
Try seeing if you can set the font DPI to 96, it seems to make GTK render a lot better, also, have you provided
tools for changing the GTK theme etc. ? (OpenBox users use lxappearance).

There are some significant changes from a year ago, and the mcs-manager is no longer a valid option when dealing with current xfce stuff. As a result, "xfsettingsd" is running in the fluxbox startup file, and I edited the "xfce4-settings" package to reflect the defaults I wanted. This way, the gtk options can be set through the xfce-appearance-settings which comes up in the menu and through mintConfig-fluxbox. It took me a few ticks to figure this one out, but it works fantastically well and eliminated the need for me to bog down the system with an additional gtk theme changing package. One thing I've tried my best to do is to eliminate system redundancies as much as is possible (major exception here being the terminal emulator, tilda is the terminal that comes up from the menu, but alt+F1 will give you xterm).

EDIT: You just done it again. Posted "FIXED" everywhere lol..

She's complete as far as I can tell (at the moment). There are only six packages that have been messed with internally, the rest of everything has been adding and removing stuff. I kept a list of every single package that was installed into or purged from Mint 8 to get it where it is right now. I'm going to upload the .iso for Clem tomorrow and hopefully we can push hard and have it ready to go in the shortest time possible. I'm hoping it goes over well as it's a well polished and well featured distro as far as I can tell (for Fluxbox, anyway).

EDIT: The only thing I'm really needing to do is to install it somewhere and make sure it works as well as an installed system, versus just a live CD (probably going to do this tonight).

[Kendall]

It seems to me that with the xfce4 settings crap you're getting a pretty complete package: appearance settings, display settings, mouse settings, etc, etc. In addition, all of these settings come in a nice, intuitive, well arranged, easy-to-mess-with setup. When I looked over Fluxbox CE 6 and saw that it used xfce-mcs-manager I presumed that completeness and congruency were a sizable part of the decision there (regardless, it's still way lighter than relying on gnome-settings-daemon). I'm using xfsettingsd which is basically a newer version of xfce-mcs-manager but for xfce 4.6. Approaching it this way made good sense to me.

I'm willing to look into other session managers though, and will do so at some point in the near future.

In other news: I have the md5sums finished for the packages I messed with. I'm going to install it in a virtual system here in a few minutes and look too see if there are any obvious bugs that didn't show up in the live CD for whatever reason.

[Kendall]

I'm right now uploading an .iso for the Mint devs to look at, play with, critique, frown upon, laugh at, yell at me for, whatnot, etc. I'm going to upload a small text file with some information to go along with it.

There's a bug that I didn't find until last night with Ubiquity and Grub2, The installer is presently crashing at 95% when it tries to run grub-install. I've spent an inordinate amount of time today and last night trying to figure this one out and I honestly think this is beyond my skill to handle. ANY insight into solving this will be appreciated at the highest level of appreciation that I'm presently capable of.

The other bug that I absolutely know exists is that Synaptic won't start from within the "mintConfig-fluxbox" application, but starts fine through the Fluxbox menu (in both places). The .iso is 592.1 MB.