The status of Mint Fluxbox CE

[Husse]

Isn't Clem working on a new installer?

Yes and no - only for the Debian version as far as I know

[Kendall]

Isn't Clem working on a new installer?

Yes and no - only for the Debian version as far as I know

I'd rather look into it and fall short of the anticipated goal than not look into it at all. Honestly, I'm not there yet, but give me a bit of time and we'll have it.

[Kendall]

Problem:
Ciao still giving me crap on an installed system, but not a live CD for some odd reason.

Solution:
Move the trigger directory out of the /tmp directory and make sure the package installs a trigger in the trigger directory (even though that trigger will be deleted as soon as the mfmrootdaemon starts).

So close...

[Locrian]

I was wondering if it will be possible to upgrade from flux felicia to flux helena without a fresh install sense, ive had quite a bit of time to make felica look and work well like the back of my hand (its truly beautiful i tell you!!!) or if helena will still use stuff like mint-fm2 and i can just copy paste some of my text files and such and have it be back to the same with little effort.

[mati75]

Kendall what kind of style? I using shiki-flux-mint and my debian with fluxbox look like:

[Kendall]

I was wondering if it will be possible to upgrade from flux felicia to flux helena without a fresh install sense, ive had quite a bit of time to make felica look and work well like the back of my hand (its truly beautiful i tell you!!!) or if helena will still use stuff like mint-fm2 and i can just copy paste some of my text files and such and have it be back to the same with little effort.

A lot of underlying system differences changed between Felicia and Helena, making this difficult but especially so when it comes to the Fluxbox packages. None of mint-fm2 works out of the box, a lot of things in the mint-fluxbox-default-settings have to be changed or you'll have stock live CD menus every time you turn it on.

Honestly you could do it, you wouldn't get an ext4 filesystem or the Grub2 bootloader, but it could be done. I personally think it would just be way less work to just start fresh with Helena, but by all means try it if you feel up to it.

[Locrian]

mmm sounds like a pain, i guess ill just start over from scratch it was fun setting it up to this point so it should be interesting doing it again. I look forward to the release and using new versions of apps hahahah.

[Kendall]

At the moment there are two major setbacks in the development of Fluxbox CE 8:

1. Some of the xfce4 stuff I was using for the miscellaneous settings (mouse, screen, etc.) is presently not working. I think I have isolated the problem and am at a 3 way crossroads:

- Run two daemons at startup to handle system settings instead of one (I really don't like this idea)
- Try and replace the first daemon with the second and run lxappearance to handle the GTK stuff (I'm ok with this)
- Build some minor system settings stuff from shell scripts and be old fashioned about it (love it, but not very "Mint-ish")

2. I had a pretty catastrophic hard drive disaster last night. Fortunately I had access to a spare (same size, but 5400 rpm vs the 7200 rpm on I had ) but I lost all of my development builds except for the one uploaded for the Mint team to look at, and one on live USB that's a little farther along, but probably not the end direction I'm going to take. I also lost all the documentation regarding where these builds are at, the most current builds of all the packages I've been working with, somewhere around 40 gigs of music, and a couple of new e-books that I hadn't backed up yet. What this means is that I have to redo everything I've done the past few days, and then try to find an effective/efficient way to compare total installed packages on my development builds versus the stable release of Mint 8 Main Edition, from which it's built (I'm fairly certain I can remember the rest of the details). In all, I'm guessing it's going to take 30-40 hours to get back where I was last night.

[Kendall]

I did say you'd have issues with xfce and friends too

Good call. I don't think it's going to end up being that bad, I just need to learn my way around this stuff a little bit better. Lxappearance is solid and effective, so what I'm going to attempt first is to run the settings helper daemon from xfce, drop the xfsettings daemon, run lxappearance, and put in a simple (and I mean VERY simple) battery checking package I threw together this morning (I don't have an applet for this installed, they're all too big).

If you need a hand give me a buzz

I'm going to take a good solid look through the xfce4-settings package and attempt to modify as necessary. I'll give you a shout first thing if I start having questions. Thanks a million.

[Locrian]

sorry to hear about the HD, the build some minor system settings stuff from shell scripts sounds very fluxbox to me . Also dont know if it would just be more trouble but if you want you can back up your stuff to my server for future data loss prevention.

[Kendall]

sorry to hear about the HD, the build some minor system settings stuff from shell scripts sounds very fluxbox to me . Also dont know if it would just be more trouble but if you want you can back up your stuff to my server for future data loss prevention.

Thanks a lot man. What I'm probably going to do is just do a remastersys-backup everyday before I go to bed and keep my new changelogs in Google Docs, but if I need a hand I'll be sure and let you know.

Regarding the distro: lxde-settings-daemon works (!) for the mouse settings, I haven't tested farther just yet. I need to figure out what lxde is using for display settings and if that works too, then I'll go that route. If it doesn't work for the display settings, I have a extremely simple (actually, saying it's simple is probably giving it too much credit) mouse speed package that I built for less complex Fluxbox setups earlier this year, unfortunately it's not very polished and only adjusts mouse speed (acceleration and threshold) whereas virtually everything else at least has the option of reversing the mouse for left handed operation. I really don't want to be THAT ghetto about the whole thing so I'm looking at it as sort of a last resort.

My battery percentage checking app I'm going to put in and assign to Alt+F3 because an applet would add another startup process and be way heavier (I think my app is something like 2 kilobytes installed. It's literally one script with two lines of code and a .desktop file, plus the usual changelog, license, and control files). Things are looking up.

EDIT: I found the lxde monitor settings package, and it works. You have to select the wallpaper again after you change the screen resolution in order for it to fit, but honestly I'm quite ok with that. Now I'm going to test it to see if it requires the daemon to work or not.

[Kendall]

I have this lxappearance thing figured out, I'm throwing in lxrandr for display settings, I'm putting together a version of fluxconf with some .desktop files so everything comes up in the menus correctly, and I'm putting in my incredibly simple mouse speed app. I'm thinking this should probably handle the bulk of everything in the system settings department. Hopefully I'll have another iso for the other devs/maintainers uploaded tomorrow.

[Husse]

Any chance that you can use testdisk to recover at least parts of the crashed harddrive?
It's in the repos and I've used it with success
Of course the disk needs to spin at least

[Kendall]

Any chance that you can use testdisk to recover at least parts of the crashed harddrive?
It's in the repos and I've used it with success
Of course the disk needs to spin at least

I tried testdisk to no avail. Basically that hard drive might be good as a paperweight, or perhaps as a crude projectile to throw in the general direction of some offending party, but not much else. Oh well, with that said, Everything's back up and running well, I'm just going to have a time about getting some of the documentation in order for this release.

[exploder]

Basically that hard drive might be good as a paperweight, or perhaps as a crude projectile to throw in the general direction of some offending party, but not much else.

That really got me laughing! The test machine went through a hard drive about every 8 times it was booted until this last weekend. It still needs some work but at least I am not creating those projectiles any more.

[merlwiz79]

I know that western digital will give you a discount if you provide the serial number.
It's called WD Customer Loyalty Program and is available in US and Canada.
http://websupport.wdc.com/store/upgrade ... nd&lang=en

[Kendall]

@merlwiz79: I think I'm going to splurge on a solid state drive for my "proper" replacement, but thanks a lot for the WD loyalty info.

The new system settings arrangement seems to be going over rather well. A few more details and I think we'll have something ready for the public. I still have to some release notes, and I'm dreading the reconstruction of the changelogs (I have an idea that might dramatically simplify the process, but it's untested thus far), but hopefully these things won't present significant hangups. Other potential delays will come with scheduling: I have a bazillion errands to run today and a date tonight so I probably won't get much done, New Year's day will probably be spent recovering from the night before so I doubt I'll get much done then, and January 4th is my birthday so I'll probably not dedicate a whole lot of time to the project then either. Outside of that, my schedule is pretty clear so I'll have plenty of time to put into it.

[thx1138]

Kendall, you know i love the work you do on the Fluxbox edition.
@all developers of any other community edition: Did you ever read such detailed, up-to-date and public talk about the hard work you do?
The new Fluxbox thingy might be a true COMMUNITY edition.

Buddies, i don't want to annoy anyone but the communication about Xfce CE and KDE CE is very different from the Fluxbox CE thread.

[merlwiz79]

@Kendall Solid state drives are really only recommended for OSes.
If you plan on using it for just storage the old HDs are still recommended.
I hope you read up on the Cons and Pros of SSDs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

@thx1138 I don't have many details that i leave out.
Most of the time I don't post all the details so I can get back to work.
So far the only details I left out for Helena is that I have to redo the artwork, mintdesktop, doc and default settings packages.
If you read the older post on Xfce you'll see all the problems I had when I first started.
I don't read the KDE posts as I see the info in the Dev forums.

[Kendall]

@Kendall Solid state drives are really only recommended for OSes.
If you plan on using it for just storage the old HDs are still recommended.
I hope you read up on the Cons and Pros of SSDs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

I think I'm going to move all of my storage to external drives and only keep what I'm working with on the actual system. This way if I ever have another freak accident like what happened the other day, there'll be way fewer issues getting everything back up to speed. Add to that the fact that most of the time (pretty much all the time until I started doing stuff for Mint) I only really used my laptop for a handful of applications and as a web portal. Thanks for the link, some very good info there.