Is there another way to set wallpaper for the Rox desktop?

[technosaurus]

I have added basic background to my simple icon tray app (now renamed to sdesk) with the intention of (eventually) providing a full desktop for jwm (or any basic wm) that doesn't rely on rox, but it works if rox doesn't set the background... It would already be done if gtkiconview didn't do illogical crap with the background.

[sunburnt]

Ahhh... Another satisfied user of GTK ( sarcasm...).

I`ve wondered if QT is any better? I really dislike GTK.

But it`s not so much a question of that, is it.?
It`s which has more and better apps., right.?


# In regards to app. portability, static compile everything the app. uses except the kernel?
.

[Nathan F]

In regards to app. portability, static compile everything the app. uses except the kernel?

Code: Select all

warning: Using 'getaddrinfo' in statically linked applications requires at runtime the shared libraries from the glibc version used for linking

Plus other similar errors. In other words, static linking is largely broken with Glibc. Another reason to investigate Musl, or even Bionic.

That said, it's a valid approach that works *most* of the time, if you give it some love. I've had fits trying to assemble the rhyme or reason to the various incantations and spells I've had to devise to "trick" a lot of programs into compiling statically. Even went so far as to ditch gawk in favor of nawk at one point when I was trying to assemble an all static toolchain.

[musher0]

Was poking around and found this. Thought I'd clarify - I got the idea for how to change the ROX pinboard background by reading the ROX-Filer manual, simple as that.(...)

Thanks for the clarification.

Regards.

musher0

[sunburnt]

It seems that Linux is such a bag of bolts that many tricks are needed.
An assessment of apps. as to their "main stream compatibility" is a good idea.
Some package up nicely. Others are warped, so find alternative apps.

Basing a distro. on a solid parent ( Debian, Ubuntu, Slack ) is most rational.
They greatly reduce the "reinventing the wheel" mistake many keep making.
Doing all of this should be relatively simple. The methods need laying out.
.

[technosaurus]

They greatly reduce the "reinventing the wheel" mistake many keep making.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweel

not me! I would go a step further than the tweel and ... patent pending

[Nathan F]

I'd rather just skip str8 to the dang flying cars they promised us when we were kids...

[technosaurus]

I'd rather just skip str8 to the dang flying cars they promised us when we were kids...

If you don't mind test flying a prototype you can (it basically looks like an Aptera with folding wings and tilt rotors)
The barrier for flying cars is not technology, it is licensure requirements combined with general laziness to restrict consumer demand.

Back on topic - perhaps it is time to "reinvent" the puppy file manager. IIRC it was only a few lines of code to add 2-pane option and the top bar could use a bit of improvement too (like using a drop-down menu if the icons don't fit ... like geany does) ... and not myself but I know others want transparency without having to do a gtkrc hack.

[sunburnt]

technosaurus; Looks like a wheel NASA had on one of their rover designs.

Are you talking about Rox? Can it have tree and file panels?
I `ve always liked WinExplorer type filers. I have Xfe which isn`t bad.
There`s a bunch of them now, haven`t tried them all. Any good Ones?
Lack of control over right-click menus is one of my major gripes.

NathanF; Jet packs, where the hell are the jet packs?
My friend and I decided the magazine Popular Science should be called Improbable Science.
I`m not sure if I`ve ever seen any of the featured items ever come to light.

[Nathan F]

Rox with an extra pane or two would be awesome. I've tried Spacefm but the menus suck. Nautilus does it, but it's Nautilus and not going to be installed on my pitiful 'puter.

If I had a wishlist for ROX-Filer that would be at the top, followed by making the filer use gtk-bookmarks instead of it's own. And finally, an option to save the window size when exiting because I'm tired of resizing ROX-Filer windows.

As devil's advocate though, two of those three things aren't issues if you use something like DWM. ROX-Filer "rocks" in DWM. The WM enforces sizing and tiling, which removes the two obstacles I find to using the filer productively.

[sunburnt]

Nathan; Rox has an option to not resize the window.
It`s one of the first things I do immediately after a fresh boot.

Do you mean 2 file panels like Midnight Commander, or tree + file like Xfe?

[Nathan F]

I know about that option, just don't think it goes far enough. The filer still opens initially sized according to how the filer thinks it should be sized. I'd rather it sized itself to the same size it was open before it was closed the last time. I tend to think most people expect that, and a lot of other applications do just that.

And I was talking about two view panes, not a sidepane, so you can drag and drop between them. It's an extremely useful feature in a filemanager but surprisingly rare amongst the more modern "browser" type filemanagers. The only ones that do it, to the best of my knowledge, are Konqueror, Nautilus, and SpaceFM. Of those only SpaceFM is really light enough for an older system, but I really dislike a lot of things about the way the menus are layed out. It's not intuitive at all.

[01micko]

As devil's advocate though, two of those three things aren't issues if you use something like DWM. ROX-Filer "rocks" in DWM. The WM enforces sizing and tiling, which removes the two obstacles I find to using the filer productively.

I must put in a feature request to Joe Wing for JWM re sizing, it shouldn't be too hard to add as a <group> option.

It annoys the crap out of me that rox opens in that little window if there are only a few files in the directory at the time.

[Nathan F]

You just gave me an idea. I think I can do that in Pekwm already, but not sure. Have to read up.

[technosaurus]

As devil's advocate though, two of those three things aren't issues if you use something like DWM. ROX-Filer "rocks" in DWM. The WM enforces sizing and tiling, which removes the two obstacles I find to using the filer productively.

I must put in a feature request to Joe Wing for JWM re sizing, it shouldn't be too hard to add as a <group> option.

It annoys the crap out of me that rox opens in that little window if there are only a few files in the directory at the time.

as in a "minimum width"

btw, can ROX not scale its own damn background images? (rather than using Puppy's scaling hack)

[Nathan F]

btw, can ROX not scale its own damn background images? (rather than using Puppy's scaling hack)

??? It scales it's background images just fine. Four modes, either Stretch Scale Centre or Tile. All behave similar to other tools that set backgrounds.

[sunburnt]

Nathan; There`s that damn "can`t control the thing" problem again.
Right click menus are one of my biggest gripes. no control over it.
Same as click to open has no standard either it seems, along with...

I`m thinking that FreeDesktop.org should have conventions for this stuff.
I don`t know if Puppy uses it for running default apps.
File lists are okay, but they`re a pain to maintain, and no common support.

Just like /usr/share/applications/*.desktop files, a default dir. with links
pointing to the desktop files is easy for any Linux desktop to support.
And a GUI to add, delete, and rearrange them would be a snap also.

Dirs. with links or scripts ( mostly links, apps should have their own scripts )
is a good way to setup lots of the boot stuff, GUI app. menus, and even mime.
This just needs to become a standard supported by the main stream Linuxes.
.

[technosaurus]

Nathan; There`s that damn "can`t control the thing" problem again.
Right click menus are one of my biggest gripes. no control over it.
Same as click to open has no standard either it seems, along with...

I`m thinking that FreeDesktop.org should have conventions for this stuff.
I don`t know if Puppy uses it for running default apps.
File lists are okay, but they`re a pain to maintain, and no common support.

Just like /usr/share/applications/*.desktop files, a default dir. with links
pointing to the desktop files is easy for any Linux desktop to support.
And a GUI to add, delete, and rearrange them would be a snap also.

Dirs. with links or scripts ( mostly links, apps should have their own scripts )
is a good way to setup lots of the boot stuff, GUI app. menus, and even mime.
This just needs to become a standard supported by the main stream Linuxes.
.

yes there are standards,
http://standards.freedesktop.org/autost ... atest.html
and
http://standards.freedesktop.org/deskto ... atest.html
the desktop entry spec is a key point for me, Puppy packagers have a tendency to strip "unnecessary" stuff out of them like localization and specifically MimeType, because if puppy left thos in I could have written an automatic default app chooser a long time ago
as for dirs with links/scripts see the contents of ~/Desktop from other file managers (it would be easy to write a wrapper to handle this - I actually did it for jwm using psuedo-icons ... actually just bunch of individual trays)

btw, geany uses simple gtkbuilder UI for the toolbar:
http://git.geany.org/geany/tree/data/ui_toolbar.xml
and now rox uses gtkbuilder too, so...

[sunburnt]

Yes, but are the standards list based, or are they dir. like /usr/share/applications

As I say, to hell with lists, use dirs. for everything.!

[Nathan F]

Those particular specs are fairly directory based. However, most DE's still fall back to lists for mime-handling for whatever reason, which is clearly counterproductive if you want to adhere to a single spec.

So inside ~/.local/share/applications you'll usually find defaults.list, mimeapps.list, and mimeinfo.cache created by whatever apps want them.

My most vehement objection to this mechanism is the behavior of browsers like Firefox and Chrome, which ask to be set as the default "Browser" and then proceed to register themselves as the default for filetypes like XML and also ftp links. This is a BUG. If I have a filemanager installed that understands how to connect to an ftp site, I don't want to click on an ftp link only to have Firefox open, for instance. Similarly, if I click on an XML file I usually want to edit it in a text editor. It's especially annoying because the only way to override it is to edit the text files in most cases. These apps should only register themselves to handle http and https hyperlinks.

This is the only real benefit to ROX-Filer maintaining it's own mime handling is that it is thus immune to problems like that.

The problem with doing away with the lists is that the user then can't set preferred apps at all under the current scheme. This occurred a few years ago in Gnome when people installed xfce alongside. Gnome Panel only cared about the .desktop files. Whenever someone opened something from the places menu in Gnome it would then open in Thunor, due to the Thunor devs capitalizing the .desktop file and the Nautilus devs leaving theirs lower case. Freaking obscure and stupid. And the only way to fix it was to rename the .desktop file, which required root privileges. A number of distros fixed it for their users, but anyone who did source installs or ran the software "vanilla", like I did because at the time I was running FreeBSD and compiling from ports, got very annoyed.

So yeah, the situation can easily become a mess in it's current state whether or not the mime lists are used.