BlackCat Astronomy Edition now available

[djohnston]

By the way, I posted a query here http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,97500.0.html, as it is Thunar related and it seemed the appropriate place to start.  But I will draw your attention to it in case you haven't seen it and might have some ideas.

Taco.22   

I'm not really up on XFCE. I think Sproggy's the best one to answer that. Or you may come up with a trick or two on your own.

[Taco.22]

I'm not really up on XFCE. I think Sproggy's the best one to answer that. Or you may come up with a trick or two on your own.

Yeah, that's the logic I followed.  It's just that Thunar has been used at times in OB so I figured there may be some familiarity here as well.  I use Thunar partly because I can configure the list view columns just the way I want.  Plus you can configure custom actions to make all sorts of things happen!  I had a look at XFE, but again, list views are limited.  Although the switching between single and double panes, with or without tree view - mix and match - hmm, that could be appealing!! 

[melodie]

I'm not really up on XFCE. I think Sproggy's the best one to answer that. Or you may come up with a trick or two on your own.

Yeah, that's the logic I followed.  It's just that Thunar has been used at times in OB so I figured there may be some familiarity here as well.  I use Thunar partly because I can configure the list view columns just the way I want.  Plus you can configure custom actions to make all sorts of things happen!  I had a look at XFE, but again, list views are limited.  Although the switching between single and double panes, with or without tree view - mix and match - hmm, that could be appealing!! 

Hi Taco,

A word about PCManFM: it is a work in progress, and there is a place for feature requests if you would like to post some. The place is located here. For other matters, you will find entries here. ie: the pcmanfm we have in testing provides a tree view. But we can't use it because it crashes each time we try to do something with it. This is why I give you these links, if in other file managers you see features that you think are cool and would be appreciated in pcmanfm, please register there and go to feature requests (one request per feature, of course). For sure, having the possibility to add to pcmanfm some extensions that you could choose from a list could be very nice.

I have a question : did the addition of 1280x1024 in the xorg.conf section of the rc.sysinit follow in the Live you remastered ? I have read your preceding post but I am not sure how to understand it.

Regards,
Mélodie

[Taco.22]

I have a question : did the addition of 1280x1024 in the xorg.conf section of the rc.sysinit follow in the Live you remastered ?

Yes, it did carry over to the live cd, but I'm not sure if it did anything.  The cd booted fine in the duo-core, but went weird on the P-4 it was created and burn't on.  It didn't auto login, and defaulted to 1024x768!!  It did it twice!!!  I then stuck it in the other P-4, where it auto logged in and presented at 1280x1024.  I don't get that .

PCManFM is something I use in the background.  It's great for wallpaper, icons, partitions - but I prefer Thunar as my actual file manager.  The two in tandem are great though.  A really good combination.  I just have a particular preference for a list layout that only Thunar offers.  It's a Mac thing from before OSX - Thunar is the only FM that I know that allows "list columns" to be fully adjustable.  Even Mac doesn't offer that any more!!  I left Thunar out of BlackCat because of space issues, and because most people use icon view anyway, so that meant there wasn't any special reason to include it.  However it is included in any build I do for myself - configuring custom actions is pretty hard to beat.  I'm finding the combination of openbox, pytyle, thunar and keybinding pretty unbeatable in terms of speed and efficiency.  It's really amazing when I switch from that to a more traditional panel-based combo.  The right-click menu and extensive keybinding is immediately missed, plus not being able to open the file manager as a one or two pane FM on the fly, and without the one-click custom actions.  Everything is left-centre-right mouse click, or more often a keyboard command.  This is how my current build is set up - I have one sandboxed as a clean build, from which I can remaster.  I may upload that at some point if people are interested in my take on what can be done with Openbox.  Because that is the key - OB rules .               

[melodie]

About pytyle, you could try to keep aware about future new releases, then take advantage of them to "up" your package request. In the first post you will add the reference to the sources of the new version, and add a quick post at the end of the thread to point to the new information...

I am not interested to learn to use that right now, but I know there are quite some people interested about tyling features...

[melodie]

Hi,

I am starting to work on your Blackcat n° 2 to install it and remaster it to French. I have installed it to a USB stick with PCLinuxOS LiveUSB, booted to persistent mode, updated it, and applied Addlocale.

I will next reboot to persistent mode, and install from there. I noticed the changes in the menu.xml and rc.xml, and I was wondering if you could also bring the changes to the other menu.xml and rc.xml files ? I mean : "en", "de", and "fr" ?

One thing I notice that I would suggest you to change : in the rc.xml you added a line to shutdown with keyboard shortcuts. Why not, but why wouldn't you use the ConsoleKit commands instead of the HAL commands which do fail once a while ? (hal is deprecated not more developed and hangs once a while).

Last detail : I noticed in rc.xml a number of lines in the personalized configurations section, which are empty : no commands. If there are no commands, why keep these lines for ? Is there any special reason ?

Looking at the whole distro, and apart from the above little details, it seems very shiny and polished. A version bright as the stars !

Regards,
Mélodie

[Taco.22]

Hi Mélodie,

Thanks for the feedback.  You do have a have a thing about shiny, don't you . 

I noticed the changes in the menu.xml and rc.xml, and I was wondering if you could also bring the changes to the other menu.xml and rc.xml files ? I mean : "en", "de", and "fr" ?

I'm not sure what you mean there as the files are in English.  Do you just need the menu and rc files saved as .fr etc?

in the rc.xml you added a line to shutdown with keyboard shortcuts. Why not, but why wouldn't you use the ConsoleKit commands instead of the HAL commands which do fail once a while ? (hal is deprecated not more developed and hangs once a while).

I simply copied the command out of menu.xml and pasted it into rc.xml.  I was not aware of other options.

I noticed in rc.xml a number of lines in the personalized configurations section, which are empty : no commands. If there are no commands, why keep these lines for ? Is there any special reason ?

I reorganised the file to eliminate keybindings for software not installed, and created a template.  I left some blanks in to make it easy for people to add their own keybindings on software they install.

I have done another version of BlackCat which has a custom font for the system, uses GKrellM as system monitor, and also has login instructions on the live CD.  I will try to upload that over the next 24 hours. 

Regards,
Taco.22

[melodie]

I'm not sure what you mean there as the files are in English.  Do you just need the menu and rc files saved as .fr etc?

No, not all. Some parts which are displayed are in French for the fr files and in German for the de files : translations by Leiche.

The "en" file is in English of course, it's just to ease the use for the people who want to remaster to their languages, else than the ones already there, if starting from a version already localized in another language. (In case of need). The default files are in English in the English versions and in French in the French versions...

I simply copied the command out of menu.xml and pasted it into rc.xml.  I was not aware of other options.

This means you have an old version.

I reorganised the file to eliminate keybindings for software not installed, and created a template.  I left some blanks in to make it easy for people to add their own keybindings on software they install.

This looks unfinished. Maybe would you comment the whole block ?

(see in the file where there are comments, it's something like "<!--- a comment --> " : I never remember exactly the syntax, so... a check would be necessary).

I have done another version of BlackCat which has a custom font for the system, uses GKrellM as system monitor, and also has login instructions on the live CD.  I will try to upload that over the next 24 hours.

 **

Would you please re-install openbox-menu twice in a row, then fetch the files which will be under /usr/share/openbox-menu, and get the right shutdown/reboot/sleep commands there ? (And same for the versions translated, if needed).

I would also like to have gparted installed, if there is space left... and if that does not bother you.

Regards,
Mélodie

PS: the shine is what makes them easier to "sell". ;-)

[Taco.22]

Hi Mélodie,

Are we aiming to fit this on a CD, or can it go over that.  I got the last remaster down to the point where an update would push it out of CD territory.  Maybe you want to see the new version and then we go from there?

Regards,
Taco.22

[melodie]

Hi Taco,

My suggest is get the updates, do the cleaning as usual, and give it a try : the latest mylivecd benefits of an improvement on the compression, thanks to some options discovered by AS that he has provided at the dev mailing list.

Now it's possible to get more to fit in 700 Mo max.

[Taco.22]

OK, I'll give it a go.  Will let you know how it goes.

[melodie]

OK, I'll give it a go.  Will let you know how it goes.

I will be looking forward to it. Thanks for your efforts !

(I seem to remember I had almost 2800 MB in the latest Openbox with Libreoffice in it, before remastering... but the result also depends on the type of files which are in the system, of course).