The status of Mint Fluxbox CE

[Kendall]

:cry:
So Ubiquity truly is broken in Karmic.... I'm wondering if the team and yourself (once the situation has been evaluated)
would perhaps test a newer Ubiquity, Clem may also be able to assist you on that matter. If not, then there is perhaps
the possibility of porting Clem's mint-debian-installer to work ? Maybe I'm being too far-fetched...

Good luck either way

It's been an issue. I saw it during my remastersys builds, but for the life of me can't remember what the exact source of the problem was (lots of purging and installing of miscellaneous packages). I was debating dropping Ubiquity altogether in favour of the Debian Installer, but I'm of the opinion that the source of the problem is more Grub2 related than Ubiquity (I'm completely aware that I may be wrong on this).

You've been of tremendous help to me, whether you realise it or not and whether I've shown adequate gratitude or not, in pointing me in directions I haven't previously explored, and in giving me some direction I hadn't previously found. I want you to know that I took your advice seriously, to the best of my ability. I'm still fairly new at this whole thing and good direction is hard to find. Thanks.

I'm hoping that the Mint team has some input on the installer bug as I'm just about dried up regarding looking into it. I tend to work fairly quickly, focusing my free time on projects rather than hanging with the women or hitting the pub with my friends, and I like to take bugs one step at a time. Honestly I'm lost with this one though and I have no ideas at this point. I purged Ubiquity, Casper, and Grub-pc (and all dependencies, which was a pain) only to reinstall them, hoping for the best. I'm about to spout off a couple of PM's to try and pry for information (and hopefully a solution). There is the outside chance that the install was simply being difficult with VirtualBox. I'd try the install elsewhere but the only computer I have to really screw with is my laptop and I can't live without it for more than a day or two.

In other news: I got invited to spend some quality time with some friends in a remote plantation home this weekend and I'll be all over that. If we have any sort of web access I'l be all over it, otherwise expect to hear from me Monday.

[kvstb]

will be a fluxbox version of mint 8?
i installed fluxbox version of mint 6 and liked it
if no, can i upgrade it to mint8 ?

[shane]

will be a fluxbox version of mint 8?
i installed fluxbox version of mint 6 and liked it
if no, can i upgrade it to mint8 ?

Kendall is working on it... hold on for a while... maybe a few weeks.

[kvstb]

thnx

[Kendall]

@ kbstb: I'm working on it as much as I'm able. Hopefully it'll be out sooner rather than later.

Good progress on the ubiquity issue from a few days ago. I still haven't nailed down exactly what it is, but I do know about a thousand things it isn't. Clem also brought a few details to my attention, and I've been working on them for most of the day.

[tawan]

Sir Kendall, it seems Clem has rested the sword on your shoulder and you're now a MInt Dev!

Well done. I hope to test soon

[Kendall]

@ ikey & tawan: Thanks a lot. I'm looking forward to you guys getting ahold of this soon.

I'm redoing the entire build fresh (again) trying to isolate the ubiquity bug. Right now I have an iso that's about 75% complete that has no install issues whatsoever. I'm hoping that the ubiquity bug was an outside chance fluke that just happened to occur with my preliminary iso build, but I'm not naive enough to actually think that was the case. I'll have an update on this situation in the next day or so as I come closer to being finished. Outside of that, the packages I've been editing are in the process of some cleaning and some checking (making sure the documentation is correct more than anything). I'm quite anxious to get this out there, but I don't want to push something that's incomplete.

[Husse]

There is something "funny" going on with Ubiquity, but I read and write far to much to keep what in memory
And of course congrats

[shane]

Congrats on joining the team, Kendall!

[Kendall]

@ Husse & shane: Thanks a lot guys.

The ubiquity bug is fixed, and it installs fine now. I spent a couple of hours today isolating which exact package was causing the problem, turns out it was mint-fluxbox-default-settings. There was an outdated grub-installer script in the package that was overwriting the current grub-installer script. Evidently I missed this particular detail when screwing with the package last week.

[shane]

Hm... I think that replacement was to remove the 'Automatically log in' option during the installation... since Ubiquity sets that up for GDM and not for Slim. It was basically hiding those checkbox options.

[Kendall]

I've been sick the past couple of days so I haven't really been feeling up to working on anything, but I did get a few things done. Notably (and probably not importantly) I made a ubiquity-slideshow-mint-fluxbox package out of the ubiuity-slideshow-mint-main package. The only real change is on the one slide where it lists some of the installed software and gives some examples of other easily attainable software. Since openoffice and thunderbird will not be included with this release, I removed them from that list in exchange for sylpheed and gimp, put openoffice back on the bottom list of easily attainable software, and changed the image to have the firefox, xchat, sylpheed, and gimp logos. I got most of the other languages changed as well, the few that I couldn't change I simply deleted that slide from.

Here's a screenshot of it running in virtualbox:

[shane]

Great work Kendall! Can't wait to give it a spin.

[Zorklat DeOrc]

Go Kendall! I am really looking forward to this. Mint was my first new distro in a long time, and it looks like you are shaping the Fluxbox CE into exactly what I want my distro to be -- light, fast, and thoroughly de-crufted.

[paolone]

very beautyful !!!!!!

Paolone

[Kendall]

Fascinating revelations of the day:

- Finally figured out how to set up startup scripts the right way in upstart, so I'm redoing some packages. The way I was doing it worked, but was more an example of creative hacking than it was of proper distro design.

- os-prober is still present after an install. Not sure why. Just to make sure this wasn't something I did, I checked it against a regular Mint 8 install and against a stock Karmic install. Evidently ubiquity just isn't getting rid of it. This may seem like a minor detail, but had I figured this out 3 weeks ago, we might have a release candidate by now.

- slim.conf handles code just like any other shell script. Don't know why I didn't think of this before, but this is far and away the simplest way I can think of to set up automatic login on a live CD. Yay!!!

[merlwiz79]

Grub2 uses os-prober to update the grub.cfg.
If you remove it people who dual boot will lose the other entries.

Which slim are you using?
I have added a lot of things to a custom slim package in the Gloria Community Repo.
I have it set up to use different config files.
This way you can have a package with the Autologin details for the live cd and then have the package removed after install.
I didn't edit it for you, since I don't know if you use the same startup script as shane did.
I also have it using /etc/grub/PostLogin/Default for login scripts.
This is used for mintDisk.

[Kendall]

Grub2 uses os-prober to update the grub.cfg.
If you remove it people who dual boot will lose the other entries.

A lot of the Felicia Fluxbox stuff looked for os-prober and would essentially run itself as a live CD if it found it, regardless of whether the system was installed or not. Thanks for getting me up to date on that.

Which slim are you using?
I have added a lot of things to a custom slim package in the Gloria Community Repo.
I have it set up to use different config files.
This way you can have a package with the Autologin details for the live cd and then have the package removed after install.
I didn't edit it for you, since I don't know if you use the same startup script as shane did.
I also have it using /etc/grub/PostLogin/Default for login scripts.
This is used for mintDisk.

I've been using Slim 1.3.1 from the Felicia repository. I'll download the Gloria one and take good look at it here in a few minutes. Thanks a million.

[merlwiz79]

A lot of the Felicia Fluxbox stuff looked for os-prober and would essentially run itself as a live CD if it found it, regardless of whether the system was installed or not. Thanks for getting me up to date on that.

You'll have to change that to Ubiquity.
I'm not sure what to do about mintDisk as it doesn't work with the new GDM.

I was hoping to make a slim configuration tool but haven't had time to learn how.
As with the new package you can have 3 configuration files.
One from the package, one from a maintainer of a distro and one to use for users to customize.
If any setting is incorrect i also have default settings compiled into slim.

[Kendall]

You'll have to change that to Ubiquity.

Already done.

I was hoping to make a slim configuration tool but haven't had time to learn how.

After getting the Helena CE releases out, I'm going to look into this. We should collaborate on this project and try and have it dialed in for Mint 9.

EDIT: Eventually I'm going to take a look at ubiquity to see if I can get the automatic login option to work with slim somehow. Isn't Clem working on a new installer? If so we should try and get it to work with whatever slim configuration tool we can come up with.