Puppy 4.2 - Desktop and Artwork

[Lobster]

cutting edge

I think this is a great default scheme and hopefully we can swap
it for the 'tangerine dream' (or 'citrus cut' theme) that is currently in Puppy.
(there are 5 themes in 4.1.1)

I would suggest that the blue icons on the desktop do not meld well with the current theme
but the menu icons are both minimalist and obvious (very hard to achieve). Well done. Coming along very well.

[WhoDo]

See main post for pic of complete desktop
Sigmund

Ah, much better IMHO. Well done, Sigmund!

I agree with Lobster about the blue desktop icons. There's a set of red icons in EZpup-4.0 that might look good on that desktop and I've got a set of very classy orange icons in my kit that might be worth a look too. I have included a small sample for your consideration.

[drongo]

One vote here for keeping the clock. Both variants in fact. They are easier to read from a distance if you don't happen to be glued to your computer.

Love the theme. I don't really mind about the colours. (Mind you I liked Barry's bright yellow and peach efforts, so you can probably ignore my colour preferences.) Is everything high enough contrast for those with "senior" eyesight?

[A MOHAMMAD ALI]

sir,

Puppy 4.1 is excellent for debugging and repair of high end workstations.
I have repaired one workstation using your Grub boot loader utility having IDE HDD.
Thanks for that.
At present puppy 4.1 is not detecting scsi hdd.

will puppy 4.2 detect scsi harddisk ?
Please include all drivers needed for for scsi harddisk detection.

A. Mohammad ali
ONGC
Chennai India

[dogone]

...I've got a set of very classy orange icons in my kit that might be worth a look too. I have included a small sample for your consideration.

That optical drive icon looks great. When/where can we can see the rest of them?

[WhoDo]

...I've got a set of very classy orange icons in my kit that might be worth a look too. I have included a small sample for your consideration.

That optical drive icon looks great. When/where can we can see the rest of them?

I'll make up a dotpet of the set compatible with the desktop icon changer. Can't promise when but it will be in time for 4.2a1, I hope.

[zigbert]

Yes, I have tried some orange icons, and it could be the match.
Please let us try more.

I have made a widget manager (see pic).
Very simple, - for the user, not for the geek. They will hack the config files anyway ...

Things are moving slowly, but I feel it's in the correct direction. The widgets is working fine at the moment, but
there are 2 issues I haven't solved, so please help.

1. When starting xonclock (the analog clock), I have to mouseclick on the desktop to see the clock.
(in other words: I have to click clock ) Have I missed something, or are there any way to refresh desktop with a command?

2. Look carefully at the picture. The 'Puppy Space' widget and the 'calender' is rendered by conky. With this wallpaper it is easy to see that the conky background doesn't match the wallpaper. It is somehow displaced. What am I doing wrong?



In the following code I upgrade the wallpaper and my widget 'Puppy Space':

Code: Select all

killall conky

TMP="`cat /root/.config/wallpaper/bg_img`"
cp "$TMP" /root/Choices/ROX-background.jpg
xli -fillscreen -onroot /root/Choices/ROX-background.jpg

conky -a top_right -x 40 -y 30 --config=$HOME/.pwidgets/conky_puppyspace_rc &

And the conky config file looks like this:

Code: Select all

background no
own_window yes
own_window_type override
#own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_colour hotpink
double_buffer yes
total_run_times 0
update_interval 3
minimum_size 140 5
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
stippled_borders 2
border_margin 4
border_width 1
default_color white
default_shade_color 333333
default_outline_color red
no_buffers yes
uppercase no
use_spacer none
#font fixed
use_xft yes
xftfont monofonto:size=16

TEXT
$alignc${color #9C8F5B}Puppy Space
${color #777777}${fs_size /} $alignr ${color #499D3A}${fs_free /}
${color #777777}${fs_bar 10 /}

Thanks for any help
Sigmund

[Pizzasgood]

Getting the wallpapers to sync is a real pain sometimes. I've considered attempting to hack ROX to just make it transparent to the "real" root-window. I have no idea how feasible that would be.

I think the most surefire way to do it is to resize the image to match the screen res, and then use the resized image in both Rox and the root-window. This can be done by writing a custom wallpaper-setter, but it makes the built-in wallpaper setter in Rox not integrate properly. Rox could probably be hacked to disable that, or better, to add an option to the options panel to either use Rox's built-in program or to run a user-defined command.


You could use a wallpaper that has a solid color on that general area. Not ideal.

You could drop Rox as far as icons go and use something else that allows the root-window to show through, but that isn't a very happy solution.


Getting Xli to just resize it in the same exact way as Rox would work, but I've been unsuccessful with that. (Was messing with it during spring with Gentoo.)



EDIT: Pizzasgood <3 orange icons.

[WhoDo]

Orange icons as requested. I have supplied only 48x48 size but have them as SVG and will upload those to a common FTP server if required. Scalable versions take the file size up to 17Mb!

**CAUTION**

This is NOT an icon theme for Dingo. I haven't yet developed that. It is merely an icon sampler for tronkel to try with his desktop design.

[WhoDo]

2. Look carefully at the picture. The 'Puppy Space' widget and the 'calender' is rendered by conky. With this wallpaper it is easy to see that the conky background doesn't match the wallpaper. It is somehow displaced. What am I doing wrong?

I don't know what you are "doing wrong", but it looks to me like each widget is being treated as a window and the false transparency is resizing the nominated background image to fit that window rather than picking up the location coordinates and filling only with that section of the background image.

Have you thought about using Rainlendar Lite as the calendar? I suppose that would complicate the widget manager though. Just a thought.

Hope that helps.

[Pizzasgood]

COOL! Not sure why you made it a .pet instead of just a .tar.gz, but whatever.

The terminal icon in it is my new favorite icon. I don't care much for the folder icon though. To bulbous.

I don't know what you are "doing wrong", but it looks to me like each widget is being treated as a window and the false transparency is resizing the nominated background image to fit that window rather than picking up the location coordinates and filling only with that section of the background image.

I don't know. It looks like he's having the same problem I was having, which is that Xli and Rox don't scale the background to fit the resolution exactly the same, so that specific lines or gradients are in the wrong spots by slight amounts.

A blind guess is: maybe it's related to the task bar. One of the programs could be resizing the image to fit the entire screen, while the other resizes it to fit the screen not covered by the taskbar. I doubt this.

You are using the same settings for both Rox and Xli, right? As far as resizing goes, Rox supports "stretch", "fit", and "scale". "Stretch" stretches it to fit exactly. "Scale" and "fit" resize it without damaging the aspect ratio, with scale doing it so the whole thing is within the screen (no hidden parts) and fit doing it so the whole screen is covered (some hangs off if the aspect doesn't match the screen). So I think you need "stretch" for this, if I remember how Xli works properly.

[dinky]

Wow, really impressed with the direction things are going for puppy 4.2, keep up the great work! I think widgets are very popular, and use them alot on my desktop. I'm trying to build widgets into Project Ripple, which I've been working on, and am looking at using either gdesklets, cairo-dock, or screenlets. Cairo-dock is looking promising at the moment. Would be very cool for puppy to have it's own set of widgets!

2 questions:

1. Using compiz-fusion, it's possible to set applications on a widget layer, then set a key binding to raise them on top of other windows whenever pressed. The rest of the time they are hidden. I find this incredibly useful... particularly when I want to see a full sized analogue clock. My key-binding is F9. Is it possible to do something similar with puppy 4.2, albeit without using compiz or transparency?
2. Is there an easy way to make widgets for puppy 4.2? For instance, in compiz-fusion any window can become a widget, simply by entering it's name in the key binding settings. Is anything like this possible for puppy 4.2?

Lastly, I was amazed to find that the Rox desktop can iconify windows to the desktop, which I find truly useful. Any thoughts about making this default for puppy 4.2? Cheers.

~dinky

[zigbert]

Mmmmmm!

Now conky renders correct.
Thank you pizzagood!!!!!
The wallpaper image must have the same aspect ratio as the screen. Now it works for both scale and stretch when using wallpaper setter. I guess this means that we need 2 different backgrounds, - for 4:3 and 16:9 screens. It makes it a little bit more complex, but - wow, how it looks.

Now it's only the xonclock-issue left. I repeat my earlier cry for help:
When starting xonclock (the analog clock), I have to mouseclick on the desktop to see the clock.
(in other words: I have to click clock ) Have I missed something, or are there any way to refresh desktop with a command?

I have checked the attached icons from WhoDo, and some of them looks really good. The problem is that there are too few of them. I have instead changed color of the stardust icons. See main post for updated pics.

[WhoDo]

I have checked the attached icons from WhoDo, and some of them looks really good. The problem is that there are too few of them. I have instead changed color of the stardust icons.

Yes, it's just a "sample" set. I haven't yet started creating the "full" set for the desktop icon changer. I intend doing that at some point so that I can use them with EZpup-4.1/4.2 as an alternative icon set, but would be willing to bring it forward to allow for their inclusion with your theme if that is holding up your progress. Why not use some of the ones you've got to create a sample desktop so people can see what they might look like with the background, even though they may not be the right icons yet?

At the moment I'm spending a lot more time just browsing the various forum, wiki and blog posts looking for positive improvements for 4.2, and I haven't spent any real time on "bling".

Cheers

[zigbert]

WhoDo

Please don't care about the icons, else you really enjoy working with them. It is much more important for Puppy and for us that you manage our input.

I'll keep on fiddling with my desktop. If/when you find it suitable to bring it into the official Puppy, let's have a chat. People are giving feedback here, and I'm listening (well, not to all of it ).

I'm not working fast here, and there are a lot more work to do. I'm just grabbing ideas where I manage to do something. For the moment, there is not much spare-time.

Sigmund

[Tom Raft]

I would appriciate if the active window could have an orange gradient.

Tom

[zigbert]

The Background has been upgraded

[zigbert]

I have done some tweaks on the traybar apps. if they are all green it is easier to notice when something is critical. Either battery is low on power, or pupsave is getting full.

Please tell me: How can I do something with the freememapplet. It just don't fit in.

Sigmund

[WhoDo]

The Background has been upgraded

I understand the idea involved, but the new one doesn't excite me the way the original does. Sorry. An alternative might be to remove the bottom arc and just leave the near vertical arc near the widgets.

The only suggestion I would make for the original is to reduce, just slightly, the Puppy indented logo size. I think one of the great attractions of the original desktop is that it says "solid" and "hard", almost "bulletproof", without actually saying that. It is the impression Puppy should give from the start IMHO.

The widgets look great on the brushed background, too. They stand out and blend in at the same time. The impression is that they are a part of the OS and not an afterthought. That too is important in Puppy.

I hope you guys will accept that as constructive criticism on your excellent project.

Cheers

[dogone]

I have done some tweaks on the traybar apps. if they are all green it is easier to notice when something is critical. Either battery is low on power, or pupsave is getting full.

Please tell me: How can I do something with the freememapplet. It just don't fit in.

Sigmund

Zigbert, how about employing pictographs for both free memory and battery level? The classic filled battery symbol and filled IC (chip) might suffice nicely. Then perhaps, mousing over each symbol could reveal the actually MB of free memory and percent of battery remaining.