KLV-Boxer tweaking

[geo_c]

Okay, I'm working on KLV-Boxer. I have to admit, it's pretty fun.

First, the fastest booting distro is by far Spectr. On my new machines with 10th gen intel 4.4 GHz processors and nvme internal drives, Spectr is booting in literally 4-5 seconds to desktop. Really makes that great for live audio stage application.

KLV-Boxer is close, more like 6 or 7 seconds.

I'm just starting to work on the desktop.

first thing I do: xbps-install xfe, then I copy in my xfe icons and xferc. Now I can navigate freely. Takes a minute or so. I'm also working on a new set of Beauty Solar icons for Xfe, that's a work in progress. but it's coming along. It requires converting .svg icons to .png, and Xfe doesn't always display them as accurately as say Rox.

Then I'm setting up the ChromeOS-darker-oceanic theme manually. Copying in geany colorschemes, etc.

Next is working on jwm. Without the pup tools to set it up, I'll have to fiddle with the configs.

Here's a few work-in-progress screenshots:

[geo_c]

Here's the current state of Boxer.

To get Thunderbird-portable to run I had to install libdbus-glib-1 as can be seen from the LXterminal output. I used OctoXbps to find it, and so the install command is not in the terminal screenshot, but it worked and Thunderbird-portable works now. To the right you can see the packages I installed so far in /var/cache/xbps, not counting the icons and themes I copied in. I've been tweaking the jwmrc files to get this desktop, and I used a 1920x1080 jpg for the desktop background set with Rox.

You can also see the xterm icon at the bottom, since these icons are .svg's, it seems Rox scales them and then displays them with that scale in all locations, or something like that. I'm not sure why that particular one is scaled down, as I didn't set it as an icon anywhere else that I can see. I installed nitrogen, which didn't work as the background is being handled by the Rox pinboard. Setting a background color in jwmrc doesn't work either. I tried installing acpi so I could get the cpu temp using the sensors command, but apparently there's more to it than just installing it. It looks like it needs to be linked as a service or something.

Still working on icons in the menu

Here's Thunar and Xfe

[rockedge]

@geo_c I'm running a PFI of the latest I built to knock out the bugs quickly to know what to add to the PLUG. I'll look at the cpu frequency scaling setup! Might drag in a Puppy Linux wallpaper GUI configuration to try out. Otherwise I right click the mouse somewhere on the pinboard desktop and change the background there.

Will need to work out the best approach for setting the background.....

[geo_c]

It's pretty confusing working with Rox and Jwm on KLV, thinking it's a puppy when it's not! It seems like a lot of the tools built in pups have to do with configuring the interplay between those two.

[rockedge]

@geo_c I had to really learn a different way starting off with JWM configuration coming from Puppy Linux and all of it's utilities and GUI panels. I consider adapting JWMDesk to KLV-Boxer to get a comprehensive JWM configuration system up and running quickly. Years of efforts by lots of Puppy users over the years fine tuned what we see today and radky's JWMDesk-3.6 is the peak of development. But it might not be a practical thing because of it's close-knit ties to Puppy Linux system design and function.

What would be useful right away? a menu editor, theme and icon set chooser GUI sounds like a goal to start with

[geo_c]

Years of efforts by lots of Puppy users over the years fine tuned what we see today and radky's JWMDesk-3.6 is the peak of development. But it might not be a practical thing because of it's close-knit ties to Puppy Linux system design and function.

What would be useful right away? a menu editor, theme and icon set chooser GUI sounds like a goal to start with

What I find interesting the more I work with Rox and Jwm, is the power of Rox. It seems to me it's kind of a window manager on it's own. Does it work like that? Or does it need an actual window manager? Maybe it would work with open box and Rox alone.

On the flip side, what's Jwm like without Rox handling any of the pinboard stuff? It doesn't seem like Rox needs to be involved with that. But best I could tell, Rox is set to handle the pinboard in Boxer. I tied using Rox options to disable it and let Jwm set the background, but that didn't seem to work.

[rockedge]

I can run a build with only Rox which apparently was designed at one time to be a full desktop enviroment. I have very quickly experimented with a Rox desktop though it might be time to try more detail.

started with rox --rox-sessions

Code: Select all

-S, --rox-session	use default panel and pinboard options, and -n

This is in the options and is used to handle the icons of the running programs:

Screenshot(33).jpg (59.89 KiB) Viewed 800 times

Rox as desktop which looks like this starting up with all defaults:

initial.png (24.91 KiB) Viewed 796 times

[geo_c]

I can run a build with only Rox which apparently was designed at one time to be a full desktop enviroment. I have very quickly experimented with a Rox desktop though it might be time to try more detail.

started with rox --rox-sessions

Code: Select all

-S, --rox-session	use default panel and pinboard options, and -n

This is in the options and is used to handle the icons of the running programs:

Screenshot(33).jpg

Rox as desktop which looks like this starting up with all defaults:
initial.png

INTERESTING!

When I brought that up I thought I was taking Rox's potential capabilities a little too far. But it does work. Probably though things like gtk and qt need to be available to run the graphics of various apps.

So does Rox allow window resizing and all that? Or does it just pop the active window up fullscreen and iconify the inactive ones?

And are you starting that with another desktop like Jwm running? Where do you start it from? I'm just curious, and as curious as I am, I would think it a bad idea to invest any time in a Rox desktop build, as I understand Rox is not being developed anymore.

[rockedge]

Yes that is the thing. Rox is no longer developed so KLV-Boxer might be the last time we'll use it in such a main role in a system.

There isn't an advantage using a full Rox desktop in our use cases it seems.