The status of Mint Fluxbox CE

[Kendall]

Making progress, I'm thinking next in the order of business is to get on top of the documentation and start getting finalized packages into the repository. Hopefully we'll have something for the public in a very short amount of time.

[Kendall]

It's been a vicious few days of some really hard core testing with the latest development build. A regression in ubiquity is basically forcing me into putting OpenOffice back into the distro. Basically, there's a dependency chain associated with one of the language packages that pulls in OO during the install in spite of the fact that it's not present in any of the development builds. Shane was quick about filing a bug report, but from the looks of it it's not something that's going to get fixed before Ubuntu 10.04 beta is available. Thus do to the fact that there are plenty of people who are working with limited bandwidth, OO has to go back in the distro.

In other news, printer support is working, there is an image viewer and a document viewer that weren't there previously, there are some changes to the right-click menu in Thunar, there is a taskmanager. Basically the whole thing is a good bit more complete than it was a day or two ago. I'm trying to keep it as light and fast as possible. We found a handful of packages that seem to have been installed upstream that aren't necessary for anything, so out they went. There shouldn't be too much longer to wait.

[Landmouse]

*cries*

Is the OpenOffice dependency only present during install? (i.e. can we remove it afterwards with no negative effects on the system?) I love OO.o, but it doesn't love my 10 year old laptop.

Thank you for all the work you're doing, Kendall! I'm waiting for your release to migrate my desktop from the main version to Fluxbox. No pressure or anything...

[Kendall]

Removing OO after installing is fine. There should be no issues. She's quick, even with the extra bulk.

[Kendall]

I'm going to test a possible workaround for the OO bug. I might not get to it tonight, but I have an idea.

EDIT: The workaround I tried was ineffective. OO will be in the release. Also, because of a few other things, the dependency chain for Decibel is almost all the way satisfied so it'll be going back in.

[Kendall]

Details, details, details. Of course details are what makes Mint what it is and I'm of no mind to even try to complain. There's been a lot of great input from other members of the team: shane contributed some things, exploder has been quick to point out details I've overlooked, and merwiz79 disected the whole thing on a level few people would be able to. The result is that she's stronger and more well rounded than before. There'll be less "relearning how to do things" for those new to Fluxbox than there would have been. I should have some more stuff in for testing this afternoon, I'm hoping it goes well.

[Kendall]

In other news:

During the winter and spring months I'm going to try and build some more complete tools to include in Mint 9 Fluxbox CE and as updates to later include in Mint 8 Fluxbox CE. Right now I'm trying to put together a tool to edit some configurations for the login manager (automatic login options and theme switching). I'm running some preliminary experiments with this right now and there's some good progress.

On the visual side of things, the "System Tools" menu is currently pretty huge. The vast majority of the things listed there are also in the mintConfig tool so I was thinking about possibly pulling some of the lesser used things out of the menu so it's less intrusive on the desktop. I would love some feedback on this after the release candidate hits.

[shane]

On the visual side of things, the "System Tools" menu is currently pretty huge.

Yes, it is. That was one of the improvements I had lined up for mint-fm2... i.e. separate System Tools into Preferences... or something like that.

[Kendall]

Yes, it is. That was one of the improvements I had lined up for mint-fm2... i.e. separate System Tools into Preferences... or something like that.

I'm looking into this right now. I like this solution as it takes advantage of the excellent Fluxbox submenu system. I'm going to try and have it nailed for the final release.

[shane]

I'm looking into this right now. I like this solution as it takes advantage of the excellent Fluxbox submenu system. I'm going to try and have it nailed for the final release.

Check out the freedesktop.org documentation on menu categories. This should help you choose what goes where... and also keeps it compliant with the standard guidelines.

http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-s ... t/apa.html

[Kendall]

Check out the freedesktop.org documentation on menu categories. This should help you choose what goes where... and also keeps it compliant with the standard guidelines.

http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-s ... t/apa.html

Thanks. I'll start digging into this as soon as I get settled down tomorrow.

[Kendall]

@shane:

I think most of the heavy lifting here has already been taken care of. Virtually everything upstream is going to be compliant and breaking down the "System Tools" submenu covers "System" and "Settings" quite well actually.

I think I'm going to pull "Simple Battery" from the menu altogether as it's going to be a bit out of place on desktop systems. It's easily reachable with Alt+F3 and will still come up in mintconfig-fluxbox. I'll make sure this is mentioned in the release notes.

[Kendall]

OFFICIAL UPDATE:

The development iso I uploaded a couple of days ago was signed off on by exploder for Clem to test as a potential release candidate. I pulled this from release candidate consideration and uploaded another development iso today to address a few things:

- 1 - There is an apt policy bug that is, from the sound of it anyway, affecting both the Fluxbox CE and the KDE CE. This has been corrected.

- 2 - The mint-fluxbox-tools package was unstable and needed to be rewritten. This has been corrected. Also it now has support for setting mouse speed and keyboard layout on a per-user basis as opposed to setting them on a system wide basis.

- 3 - The "System Tools" submenu was irritating me to the point that I felt I had to do something. The changes considered a few posts back have been implemented and the whole thing is cleaner and more visually appealing.

I didn't see any regressions between this most recent iso and the one from a few days ago, but Mint policy dictates that the whole thing must be tested again. I'm glad of this because it keeps details from slipping through the cracks and as a result keeps the quality as high as possible. Hopefully exploder signs off on this one as well, and hopefully Clem agrees.

In other news: Saturday makes two solid months of working on this project, and tomorrow makes one solid month of me being on the Mint development team. Yay!

[tawan]

Congratulations! Glad you're enjoying it. It must be tough keeping to Mint standards but we all know that the quality is what makes this distro what it is

[mintnoob]

I downloaded Fluxbox yesterday just to try it out since I've tried out all the other Mint DE's and was just curious cause I didn't understand the need for so many lightweight DE's because computers are so cheap these days, especially for a used one that can handle at least Xfce well.

But wow, Fluxbox is pretty cool! Love the dropbox! The first time I clicked down the drop box I said what a novel idea. Why do I have to waste time dragging my mouse down to the left-hand corner all the time just to bring up the menu?!

If I was aiming to choose Xfce over GNOME, I'd actually give Fluxbox serious consideration.

[Kendall]

OFFICIAL UPDATE:

The iso I put up yesterday seemed to have gone over rather well with a couple of exceptions:

- 1 - Firefox still had Thunderbird set as the default email client. As some of you may have guessed, Thunderbird will not be included in this release. Sylpheed is the default email client. Anyway, merwiz79 had some great insight on how to fix this and it's now corrected.

- 2 - xfce4vino is now in the startup script.

- 3 - It's come to the team's attention that the addition of network-manager-pptp could help a lot more people get online. This is not in the main release but is now installed by default in the Fluxbox CE.

I'm putting up another iso right now. Wish me luck.

[markfiend]

Good Luck.

I didn't really get a chance to look at the source properly over the weekend by the way, it's all a bit baffling to be perfectly honest.

[Kendall]

I didn't really get a chance to look at the source properly over the weekend by the way, it's all a bit baffling to be perfectly honest.

No worries. It's nice to have additional support in the coding department, but if it's not your forte then there are certainly other ways you can contribute to the Mint if you want. Scripting can be a bit overwhelming at first, but with some good references it really isn't that big of a deal. Find some good books and a good online tutorial or two and, with a little effort, you should be on your way. Since the bulk of the work on the Fluxbox CE seems to be well situated, I've been trying to get up to speed in Python. I did a good bit of screwing with it several versions ago, but I'm WAY rusty.

[Kendall]

OFFICIAL UPDATE:

Clem is currently testing LinuxMint-8-Fluxbox-DEV-052.iso as a potential release candidate. He had to take over the development of the KDE CE to get the RC out because Boo is away for a while. Fortunately everything is situated in that department for the time being. I'm particularly interested in getting Clem's feedback on this. I'm antsy and checking the forums and Twitter every 10 minutes or so.

[Locrian]

hahah im sure you did good man and cant wait too drive this beast!