Suggested Puppy Control Panel

[Lobster]

MurgaLua will be supported in 2.16 but as far as I know is not available in 2.15 (feature set frozen anyways)

That means the program could potentially be used in 2.16 . . .
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puppy216

[BarryK]

Yes, murgaLua will be in 2.16. I also posted a comment at my News Blog that although murgaLua will soon be in Puppy, I prefer developers to create GTK2 GUIs. There are various strong reasons for that, including a consistent look-and-feel, especially consistent theme and dialogs across all apps. However, I deleted the comment.

Perhaps I was being too idealistic when I made the post. Puppy is currently a mix of different GUI widget libraries and ...well, that's what we've got for sometime.

Theoretically, John could redesign murgaLua to use another GUI-builder like Enveria, which is for designing GUIs for GTK2 and generates C code. If I recall rightly, Fluid (the FLTK GUI builder) generates C++ and John modified that to generate Lua code (I just looked at John's murgaLua page and he did that in an hour!!!!).
Anyway, this is just wild speculation.
John's real busy now, earning his daily crust...

Regarding a Control Panel, don't forget that Brad has started on something like that, written in C I think. So be careful about duplication.

Oh yes, don't forget that you can use Xdialog, gxmessage, xmessage, gtkdialog and gins with murgaLua to create quite nice GTK2 GUIs. The last two will work with Glade, so you have a graphical GUI-builder for GTK2.
...if this comes across that I'm trying to influence you in a certain direction, it's because I am

[veronicathecow]

Hi Flash, that's brilliant, especially for someone moving from Windows to Linux. We could have default ones available and then people can edit to what they find easiest to understand.
Please Barry etc can we have this feature???

[Nathan F]

Just a few thoughts to go along with what Barry has said. As of this moment in time, the most logical gui to standardise around is gtk2, so in essence I agree with Barry's reasoning for pushing people in that direction. The majority of the applications that are useful and well supported, as well as being under active development, are either gtk2/Gnome or KDE based, but KDe is obviously not what we want to standardize around for Puppy.

However, gtk2 is taking a lot of criticism lately for becoming slow an bloated, and frankly this is well founded. If there was more support for fltk in general then I think it would be a perfect match for Puppy, because the gui is able to draw it's windows in lightening speed, when compared alongside gtk2 or qt. I think eventually either fltk or fox will become just as widespread as gtk is now, and be the best all around lightweight gui library. Of the two I think that fltk is more likely to be successful in the long run, mainly because several major projects are using it and it is totaly cross platform, like qt, without any exceptions.

So basically, keeping a foot (or at least a toe) in fltk development, and by extension Murga-Lua, is good planning for the future. But if you want to program gui apps that will feel at home in Puppy now, then any of the utils Barry mentioned are a good starting point.

For a good example of a reasonably large project using fltk look at flphoto, which is growing up by leaps and bounds now. As the name implies it is a photo viewer. Also, Dillo is being ported to fltk, which is the reason their releases are so few and far between right now. A few other big projects are either exploring it or are actively being ported to fltk. Cinepaint is in the process of porting it's entire codebase to c++ using an fltk gui, and even in it's stable branch several of the plugins now use fltk gui's (with a small layer of compatability so they can talk to the lagacy Gimp code). There is even a project underway to create a complete desktop environement around the toolkit, much like Gnome grew up around gtk, although it is unlikely to ever become as complete as Gnome, KDE, or XFCE.

Nathan

[BarryK]

Nathan, thanks for providing that summary of how FLTK is developing. The Dillo project... they have been porting to FLTK for ages ...and ages... the latest news on their site is that the project is frozen.

[veronicathecow]

Hi dvw86, also meant to say that I love the icons, so clear and informative. Great work!

[ttuuxxx]

Here is a program for changing many of the system settings in Puppy. It is not fully functional yet. I started making it for my own use and pleasure, but there has been some attention lately to making an "official" one for Puppy. So here is what I have so far.


The main "page" or screen with all of the options. Each icon is a button that will load the options for that group.


The center top title is also a search field on the first page. As you start typing it will try to guess what button you may want and highlight them. This is very fast and automatically updates after each keystroke. as you can see here, three buttons get highlighted if you type the word "screen"


If we continue typing and type out "screen saver" only one button is left highlighted.

Here is what the first page looks like. It is the "Appearance" or JWM configuration page.

Ideas, comments, and suggestions are welcome.

Any possibility of a release? This control panel could be used in 4.2 &5.0
Both version still have a lot of work to be started/done. But it would be nice to have something like this.
ttuuxxx