Suggested Puppy Control Panel

[JohnMurga]

312K is uncompressed for the run time executable. Personally, I feel that it has the small size, speed, and features to be a good base language for a small Linux like Puppy. That's probably why the DSL people chose it as well.

Well, originally I wanted a runtime for Windows and Linux that gave me the GUI, networking, and XML features in less than 500k

People forget that you get a lot more than just the GUI stuff

If you have any issues or suggestions at all let me know, I'll be releasing the next version at some point in the next couple of weeks ...

And if you don't mind I'd definitely like to use this for next version of MeanPup (whenever it comes out).

Cheers
JohnM

[Lobster]

One of the superb features of MurgaLua are the tutorials. I wonder if any code from DSL will be found in the next Meanie?

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/MeanPuppy

[dvw86]

Okay, here is what I have so far. This is nowhere near complete but the firewall and JWM "Appearance" pages work. I ran into some trouble with the JWM themes if you have already ran Puppy's theme setter. The built in Puppy theme setter would insert the theme code anywhere there was a blank line in the file. This makes things a little messy, and my confuse this program. This program will always insert the theme code into the end of the file. I suggest that you try this first by booting from CD into RAM and then installing and running this program. That way there is no chance of messing up your "main" pupsave file. There is a lot of my de-bug code still in there and it needs cleaned up. I did a lot of it during the middle of the night and after I had been awake for over 30 hours. I had Blinky not get swallowed into the tray a few times during the testing as well. I have not had time to look into it yet though. Also, I noticed that the JWM "insert programs left" feature does not work at all. Even with a fresh install of Puppy and using the built in JWM configuration tool. It looks to be a JWM bug. If a theme has a non Alpha character in it, then it may not get loaded. For instance I had to rename puppy-xp to puppXP. This could possibly be worked around though. I'm using Puppy 2.13 but this should also work in 2.14. If you have not installed murgaLua you will need to download the run-time executable as well. You can get it here. Just download it and move it to /root/my-applications/bin. The Control Panel can be installed anywhere. It is a RoxApp and should be started by just clicking on the icon. I'm thinking of putting the murgaLua run-time into the Control Panel RoxApp to make things easier for people to install it. It would just add about 300k to the overall size. The murgaLua documents and source code can be found on John Murga's home page.
http://www.murga.org/devPages/murgaLua/

SystemTools.tar

[SirDuncan]

I was looking at the Lua pages and came across something that might be useful to you. There is mention of a code wrapper called lua2c that will convert Lua code to C code. I don't know how well it works and I couldn't find any actual information on it, just a download link ftp://ftp.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/pub/lhf/lua2c.tar.gz. If it works well, you could write the control panel in Lua, convert it to C and then compile. No one would be able to complain that they must add the Lua interpereter to their Puppy install. Just a thought. It might not be worth the trouble given the size of the interpereter, your idea to just include it in the Roxapp might be better.

I personally think that Lua seems like a language that deserves serious consideration for Puppy and I have no problem with adding 312k to my install. Some people will argue that every 300k counts, and it does but I don't know of anything similiar in power to Lua that is as small. It just makes sense to me.

That being said, I downloaded the control panel yesterday. It really does look good. Seems to work well too. Good job and keep it up.

[bostonvaulter]

How is this coming along? Is it still going to be included in 2.15CE?

Jason

[Lobster]

MurgaLua will be supported in 2.16 but as far as I know is not available in 2.15 (feature set frozen anyways)

That means the program could potentially be used in 2.16 . . .
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy216

[BarryK]

Yes, murgaLua will be in 2.16. I also posted a comment at my News Blog that although murgaLua will soon be in Puppy, I prefer developers to create GTK2 GUIs. There are various strong reasons for that, including a consistent look-and-feel, especially consistent theme and dialogs across all apps. However, I deleted the comment.

Perhaps I was being too idealistic when I made the post. Puppy is currently a mix of different GUI widget libraries and ...well, that's what we've got for sometime.

Theoretically, John could redesign murgaLua to use another GUI-builder like Enveria, which is for designing GUIs for GTK2 and generates C code. If I recall rightly, Fluid (the FLTK GUI builder) generates C++ and John modified that to generate Lua code (I just looked at John's murgaLua page and he did that in an hour!!!!).
Anyway, this is just wild speculation.
John's real busy now, earning his daily crust...

Regarding a Control Panel, don't forget that Brad has started on something like that, written in C I think. So be careful about duplication.

Oh yes, don't forget that you can use Xdialog, gxmessage, xmessage, gtkdialog and gins with murgaLua to create quite nice GTK2 GUIs. The last two will work with Glade, so you have a graphical GUI-builder for GTK2.
...if this comes across that I'm trying to influence you in a certain direction, it's because I am

[veronicathecow]

Hi Flash, that's brilliant, especially for someone moving from Windows to Linux. We could have default ones available and then people can edit to what they find easiest to understand.
Please Barry etc can we have this feature???

[Nathan F]

Just a few thoughts to go along with what Barry has said. As of this moment in time, the most logical gui to standardise around is gtk2, so in essence I agree with Barry's reasoning for pushing people in that direction. The majority of the applications that are useful and well supported, as well as being under active development, are either gtk2/Gnome or KDE based, but KDe is obviously not what we want to standardize around for Puppy.

However, gtk2 is taking a lot of criticism lately for becoming slow an bloated, and frankly this is well founded. If there was more support for fltk in general then I think it would be a perfect match for Puppy, because the gui is able to draw it's windows in lightening speed, when compared alongside gtk2 or qt. I think eventually either fltk or fox will become just as widespread as gtk is now, and be the best all around lightweight gui library. Of the two I think that fltk is more likely to be successful in the long run, mainly because several major projects are using it and it is totaly cross platform, like qt, without any exceptions.

So basically, keeping a foot (or at least a toe) in fltk development, and by extension Murga-Lua, is good planning for the future. But if you want to program gui apps that will feel at home in Puppy now, then any of the utils Barry mentioned are a good starting point.

For a good example of a reasonably large project using fltk look at flphoto, which is growing up by leaps and bounds now. As the name implies it is a photo viewer. Also, Dillo is being ported to fltk, which is the reason their releases are so few and far between right now. A few other big projects are either exploring it or are actively being ported to fltk. Cinepaint is in the process of porting it's entire codebase to c++ using an fltk gui, and even in it's stable branch several of the plugins now use fltk gui's (with a small layer of compatability so they can talk to the lagacy Gimp code). There is even a project underway to create a complete desktop environement around the toolkit, much like Gnome grew up around gtk, although it is unlikely to ever become as complete as Gnome, KDE, or XFCE.

Nathan

[BarryK]

Nathan, thanks for providing that summary of how FLTK is developing. The Dillo project... they have been porting to FLTK for ages ...and ages... the latest news on their site is that the project is frozen.

[veronicathecow]

Hi dvw86, also meant to say that I love the icons, so clear and informative. Great work!

[ttuuxxx]

Here is a program for changing many of the system settings in Puppy. It is not fully functional yet. I started making it for my own use and pleasure, but there has been some attention lately to making an "official" one for Puppy. So here is what I have so far.


The main "page" or screen with all of the options. Each icon is a button that will load the options for that group.


The center top title is also a search field on the first page. As you start typing it will try to guess what button you may want and highlight them. This is very fast and automatically updates after each keystroke. as you can see here, three buttons get highlighted if you type the word "screen"


If we continue typing and type out "screen saver" only one button is left highlighted.

Here is what the first page looks like. It is the "Appearance" or JWM configuration page.

Ideas, comments, and suggestions are welcome.

Any possibility of a release? This control panel could be used in 4.2 &5.0
Both version still have a lot of work to be started/done. But it would be nice to have something like this.
ttuuxxx