Tiny Core Linux

Tiny Core Base => TCB Q&A Forum => Topic started by: aplannan on May 05, 2009, 11:56:13 AM

Title: switching window managers
Post by: aplannan on May 05, 2009, 11:56:13 AM

New to TC and to linux in general. I have a small amount of experience with puppy linux, another distro which uses JWM as the default window manager. JWM in puppy seemed to have a problem with flashplayer going to fullscreen , and TC seems to be having the same problem. With puppy my solution was to switch to fluxbox, which i really liked using. Wondering how difficult it would be to use fluxbox with TC. 
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: roberts on May 05, 2009, 01:02:13 PM
I am currently working on it for 2.x. By way of a small collection of iterface programs.

Some questions have already come up why I was demoting JWM from controlling startup and restart programs as well as background and other areas. Many of these I have been moving to the control of .xsession and independent programs.

I have flwm, my favorite WM, currently integrated with TC. Fluxbox integration  is next on my TODO.
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: aplannan on May 05, 2009, 01:45:57 PM
Hi,

Thank you for the very quick response. I downloaded fluxbox and followed the directions here:

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.com/tiki-index.php?page=Creating+Extensions

I installed the fluxbox.tce and changed the xsession and .desktop files and actually got it to work. I still need to clean it up and manually make a new menu, but I'm up and running. This is a very neat distro!

Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: roberts on May 05, 2009, 02:06:42 PM
Great. The interface files I am making will allow the extension menu to be updated upon loading of extensions, ie, parsing jwm xml to flux [](){}
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: aplannan on May 05, 2009, 03:19:19 PM
Don't know if this will interest you or not, but i remembered that someone had made a similar script for puppy:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?search_id=1996554511&t=24987
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: hairywill on May 05, 2009, 03:44:42 PM
I have a small amount of experience with puppy linux, another distro which uses JWM as the default window manager. JWM in puppy seemed to have a problem with flashplayer going to fullscreen , and TC seems to be having the same problem.
jwm had patches for fullscreen applied to the subversion repository 5 - 7 weeks ago. Try compiling the latest jwm nightly (http://joewing.net/programs/jwm/#description). Also, different websites have different minimum requirements for the flash version number to achieve fullscreen.
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: curaga on May 05, 2009, 04:27:30 PM
Hmmm, rounded corners, transparency, other fixes. Might be a nice release. I wonder if it fixes the initial-window-placement-under-tray and the icons-disappear-under-new-Xorg bugs.

hairywill, I believe some of these fixes are from you; thanks :)
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: jpeters on May 05, 2009, 04:36:08 PM
I have a small amount of experience with puppy linux, another distro which uses JWM as the default window manager
Now there's an understatement...how about one of the most respected members of the puppy community....(at least that's how I see it). Great to see you over at tc...
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: tobiaus on May 05, 2009, 05:29:18 PM
JWM in puppy seemed to have a problem with flashplayer going to fullscreen , and TC seems to be having the same problem. With puppy my solution was to switch to fluxbox, which i really liked using.

yeah, this annoys me too, it's actually the biggest problem i have with jwm. however, i've tried tiling managers, gnome, kde, openbox, flux, blackbox, flwm, xfce, and i tried to build slax with a tabbed manager yesterday. i've also tried just using a term as the "window manager" in x. none of these make me as happy as jwm. also i dislike flux (well, gnome and flux) the most of them. good news is that using an alternate wm in tc is almost as easy as it is in puppy (1.x,) from my experience. 2.x (http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=1437.msg7921#msg7921) moreso (http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=1412.msg7849#msg7849).
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: hairywill on May 06, 2009, 07:24:18 AM
@jpeters
The quote you posted was from aplannan not me. I would have said I have a large amount of experience with puppy.

@curaga
I have poked at jwm a bit and did identify a cause of the fullscreen problem. All the recent work on rounded windows / transparency and bug fixes has been done by Patriot and Joe himself. See this thread. (http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=39162) I have done a couple of weird things with jwm, speaking menus (http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=19533) and flyout trays (http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=17640).

I am currently taking a break from doing any linux development but I have been reading here for a bit and think that tc is great. It is interesting to see the difference between puppy as a fully configured newbie friendly live cd and tc as a very powerful compact distro building base system. Barry Kauler is currently working on a new puppy build system called woof which uses an existing debian / ubuntu / slackware (and I think fedora) repository to build an iso. There really ought to be areas of cross fertilisation between puppy and tc. I hope that the dsl murgalua argument has not soured the relationship between the two communities. I think that dsl made more use of murgalua than puppy ever did.
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: tobiaus on May 06, 2009, 03:39:22 PM
Quote
I think that dsl made more use of murgalua than puppy ever did.

it did. murgalua was an excellent means of scripting... i really liked murgalua and miss it now that i use tc, but it's gone now and i don't think it will be back. i'm sure it took a lot of work to change everything over to fltk/lua and i think under the circumstances that was the best thing to do.

There really ought to be areas of cross fertilisation between puppy and tc. I hope that the dsl murgalua argument has not soured the relationship between the two communities.

i can't imagine in countless realities how that could be a good idea. with all the trouble in the past, wouldn't it be nice to keep it there, move on, and see other people? i know how these things go, we feel guilty and say "let's just be friends!" because it worked so well before. let's not, let's just leave each other alone, can't we? not telling anyone "stay out," i can't say no one will ever use a puppy idea here, and puppy should use tc ideas if they want, that's why free software is great. but i can hope anyone that comes here generally leaves puppy at the door, even if they don't. see below:

the opinions expressed in this post are those of tobiaus and not those of robert shingledecker, tinycore's other users, or its developers.
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: SublimePorte on May 12, 2009, 04:31:36 AM
It probably goes against the lightweight philosophy of TCL, but it'd be nice to see openbox, and LXDE on TCL. That would make it quite usable for me.

I had a go at compiling openbox myself, but ran into too many problems with the locations of libraries. It was a nightmare to get through the configure script, and even things which were clearly installed were not being detected (even after setting variables per wiki instructions).
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: tobiaus on May 12, 2009, 06:32:25 AM
It probably goes against the lightweight philosophy of TCL, but it'd be nice to see openbox, and LXDE on TCL. That would make it quite usable for me.

well, there is an openoffice extension. openbox and lxde are reasonably lightweight. lxde was created by pcman, the same guy that makes the ridiculously lightweight nautilus/xfe clone i'd like to see in tc. (xfe needs a heavy library, pcmanfm does not.) EDIT: yeah consider this a second "vote" (loose term, you can't ultimately make volunteers do anything by voting) for lxde, it includes pcmanfm so i can strip the extension to get the file manager for myself. (if the extension is created by someone.)
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: SublimePorte on May 13, 2009, 11:27:41 AM
I managed to cpmpile pcmanfm and get it running on tcl, but a file manager alone is not really sufficient, a full lxde desktop would be nice for tcl, and would still keep it fairly lightweight, relatively speaking.
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: tobiaus on May 13, 2009, 02:05:49 PM
I managed to cpmpile pcmanfm and get it running on tcl, but a file manager alone is not really sufficient, a full lxde desktop would be nice for tcl

like you've probably already gathered from this thread, different wm's are going to be easier to use in 2.x, so it's just a matter of someone compiling lxde and making it into an extension. i'm all for it, and i'd compile it myself but i can't even compile pcmanfm, so you've already outdone me there. but until someone creates an lxde extension, i hope you'll find a way to make a package from pcmanfm, i've wanted that for tc for a long time.
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: robc on May 13, 2009, 11:57:50 PM
Quote
I managed to cpmpile pcmanfm and get it running on tcl
Were you able to get the icons to work? I was able to get it compiled along with all of the missing dependancies (I disabled HAL) but the icons do not show up when running.
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: SublimePorte on May 14, 2009, 02:51:43 AM
I did make it into a tce package, along with it's dependancies. However, I really don't know if it'll work for you, as it was quite a laborious process, and was my first attempt to make a tce. But if you like I can send you the tce's, also I built it without hal support, so it won't have auto-mounting of drives.

I built it for 1.x
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: SublimePorte on May 14, 2009, 02:52:43 AM
I didn't get the icons working, but I don't think it's too difficult, you just need to install a gnome set of icons and set them up in your gtkrc file.
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: curaga on May 14, 2009, 07:01:18 AM
Would gnome-icon-theme.tce in the 2.x repo help?
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: robc on May 14, 2009, 11:10:09 AM
Quote
Would gnome-icon-theme.tce in the 2.x repo help?
I believe that could solve the problem of the missing icons, the .gtkrc-2.0 file would need to have the right theme declared to use them. Would that extension be exclusively for 2.x? It is mostly png files.

-Edit-
I just loaded the gnome-icon-theme.tce from 2.x into 1.x and put the following line in the file .gtkrc-2.0 in $HOME:
Code: [Select]
gtk-icon-theme-name="gnome"This allowed the icons to be used.

@SublimePorte
Are you going to submit your pcmanfm.tce to tcesubmit? If not I can send mine in with the dependencies as separate tces (gamin and libstartup-notification).
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: SublimePorte on May 14, 2009, 05:32:09 PM
robc,

Send yours in, as it was my first attempt at building an extension, and is probably pretty poor quality. Perhaps after I play around with building extensions more, I can release some other component of LXDE as an extension.
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: robc on May 14, 2009, 05:51:30 PM
Quote
Send yours in
Ok, I submitted it and the dependencies  :)
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: SublimePorte on May 14, 2009, 08:08:47 PM
Whilst trying to build openbox on 2.0rc I've realised the pango libraries are a bit outdated. (openbox requires 1.8 >= and we only have an extension for 1.22.4, which is from 2003). Is pango kept at such an old version for a reason? ie. compatability with some other component of TCL? Or would it be fine to just compile the most recent package?

edit:
Actually I've just realised they have a strange versioning system, 1.22 is higher than 1.8 (should be 1.08 I think), so we have newer libraries, but because the way the versioning system is, it detects it as being insufficient version.
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: mikshaw on May 14, 2009, 09:36:21 PM
Quote
Actually I've just realised they have a strange versioning system, 1.22 is higher than 1.8 (should be 1.08 I think)
That's not actually strange.  In the Linux world, versioning is not based on the decimal system, but on a system using a format of major.minor.patch

For example, 1.8 precedes 1.22, where 1.22 means one-point-twenty-two (the 22nd minor release) rather than one-point-two-two (the 2nd minor release with a 2nd patch)
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: SublimePorte on May 14, 2009, 09:44:53 PM
If that's the case, then the comparison test in the configure script for openbox isn't following the standard.
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: curaga on May 15, 2009, 05:52:05 AM
Heh, I remember the first time I saw that too :)
Ah, the nostalgy.

Anyway, the error message is not clear. Even though it says dependencies not met and lists versions, the issue is usually that it can't find the pkgconfig files (did you set PKG_CONFIG_PATH?)
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: SublimePorte on May 15, 2009, 09:18:42 AM
All env variables set as per wiki instructions, yes.

ran sed 's/1.8.0/1.22.4/g' on the configure script and it ran fine after that.

However, I now have the problem of not having xft available. Is this different to libXft?
Title: Re: switching window managers
Post by: curaga on May 15, 2009, 01:33:13 PM
No, libXft is the right one. It needs fontconfig and expat though, so not having those loaded might prevent compiling against it.