Puppy GUI made simple.

What features/apps/bugfixes needed in a future Puppy
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snayak
Posts: 422
Joined: Wed 14 Sep 2011, 05:49

Puppy GUI made simple.

#1 Post by snayak »

Dear All,

One day, I wanted to see CPU temperature on my desktop.
I had to fight with Pwidgets to get it done. Though, I got a tool, tempicon.pet, it's svg didn't work on Wary500.

However, I liked the idea of tempicon. It simply was trying to get temperature, make an icon and trying to place it in tray.

One more thing I got is, an executable that inserts a text in tray. That is most probably "gtray-load". Anyway, the very idea is, with smaller tools and some scripts we will be able to add an element of our GUI. Simple and Elegant structure.

One nice attempt is:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=76431

I wish:

Why not our GUI (the whole) be made up of some scripts and a bunch of icons?

One example:
Once I tried to load Lighthouse pup. It worked great. But when some of the sfs are not loaded, it left start menu with some entries, clicking on which it resulted nothing. I thought of removing those sterile entries from start menu. I found that it was based on xdg. After a lot of search, I was able to figure out some *.desktop files, from where we get the executable names, if those executables were not present (because some sfs were not there) clicking on that entry was not reacting at all. Finally I saw fixmenus script. Added some code to rename those *.desktop files for which executable names are not found in system. Now it worked!

The idea is to make the whole GUI of puppy made up of some scripts, some predefined directories (where icons are found), some texts, and some smaller cli tools, so that one can add any kind of GUI element he likes with lesser effort. And to have simplicity and symmery in all elements. I mean, tray icon entries, start menu entries, desktop icon entries, clock/wether/calandar widgets etc. are all to be treated in similar manner, just with a difference that they are of different type of entries and have a different place for them.

I liked the xml stuff of xdg, but after I read fixmenus script, I lost the track. It seems a lot of level of parsing happens.

Is it that, current GUI architecture of puppy allows us to directly add a package from ubuntu/slackware? With evry icon/menu-entry in proper places?

Looking forward to see your opinions.

Sincerely,
Srinivas Nayak
[Precise 571 on AMD Athlon XP 2000+ with 512MB RAM]
[Fatdog 720 on Intel Pentium B960 with 4GB RAM]

[url]http://srinivas-nayak.blogspot.com/[/url]

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harii4
Posts: 448
Joined: Fri 30 Jan 2009, 04:08
Location: La Porte City, IA , U.S.A.
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#2 Post by harii4 »

If you want widgets with gui - give gkrellm a try. :lol:
It has many plugins and an simple gui.
3.01 Fat Free / Fire Hydrant featherweight/ TXZ_pup / 431JP2012
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Peace and Justice are two sides of the same coin.

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