Lumina anyone?

[Bert]

Thanks to today's Distrowatch News, I discovered Lumina.

The Lumina website is here.

From the "About" section:

The Lumina Desktop Environment is a lightweight system interface that is designed for use on any Unix-like operating system. It takes a plugin-based approach, allowing the entire interface to be assembled/arranged by each individual user as desired, with a system-wide default layout which was setup by the system administrator. This allows every system (or user session) to be designed to maximize the individual user’s productivity.

The Lumina desktop developers understand that the point of a computer system is to run applications, so Lumina was designed to require as few system dependencies/requirements as possible. This allows it to be used to revitalize older systems or to allow the user to run applications that may need a higher percentage of the system resources than were previously available with other desktop environments.

All of this results in a very lightweight, customizable, and smooth desktop experience with minimal system overhead.

I really liked what i saw: a light-weight desktop, lighter than Xfce and Lxde, giving the user total and easy control of the desktop appearance.

Tried to install a lumina.deb in Linux Lite, but failed. Probably due to Linux Lite not being a pure enough debian derivate...Or -more likely- my clumsiness messed up things.

It would be great if someone could create a pet for Lumina!
If only because we can. (well, some of us... )

[tallboy]

Extremely Lightweight
Can be used on systems with 1GB of memory (Lumina typically uses less than 150MB of memory)

Wow!

(hmm... no, I think it should be wowowowowow! wowow! instead, 150MB is more than my current puppy uses!)

tallboy

[peebee]

Thanks to today's Distrowatch News, I discovered Lumina.

The Lumina website is here.

Hi Bert

It would appear that, like LXQT, it is built on Qt5 and so a Qt5 package for Puppy is required (does not yet exist?) and will be huge I think.

Cheers
peebee

[stemsee]

QT5.2

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 230#830230

[peebee]

QT5.2

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 230#830230

= 47MB before you even start to add Lumina and dependency Fluxbox.

[Bert]

Hi peebee, tallboy, stemsee and all,

Thanks for the useful replies!
I did not get any email notification for this thread...

Yes, Lumina is not exactly light-weight in the traditional Puppy sense. It is lightweight on resources, but needs lots of space.
Of course, JWM or icewm only need a fraction of that space and maybe only half the ram. But honestly they cannot really be compared, as they do not offer the desktop flexibility, future-proofing and ease-of-use most users expect nowadays.

As a long time Puppy user, I also have the old dream deeply engrained: running a sub-100MB distro, using less then 60MB of memory...It is sometimes difficult to get rid of this old model, which was entirely based on the hardware we had over ten years ago.

If QT5.2 is 47MB, then we have to decide if it's worth the space it occupies.
The revolution-of-the-decade is that space has become dirt-cheap. Nowadays, in a way, 47MB is just "a breadcrumb on the skirt of the universe" to paraphrase a Dutch poet (Lucebert).

Today I've been playing with AntiX 15-full edition. It almost fills a CD, but is as fast and light weight as Puppy.
I guess "Lite" needs constant redefining

Thanks again,
Bert

[tallboy]

I see your point, Bart. Trouble is, I sit in front of a 19" Intergraph screen run by a vintage 1.2GHz P4 box with 512Mb RAM, and I cannot afford a modern upgrade, so to me, size matters!
But I agree that the world has leaped forward, and that the new puppy recruits could be met with new power under the hood. I browsed the Lumina pages, and the plugin concept seem sound and forward oriented. Maybe it should have been written from scratch in C/C++ without ANY dependecies?

I'll check out Antix, sounds promising...

tallboy

[L18L]

I guess "Lite" needs constant redefining

Agreed!

For my taste Fatdog64 is lite.

I have also been trying to install lumina but without any success.

As Lumina is coming from PC-BSD I installed recent version of PCBSD from USB stick to a partition. Now I know why they call it lite:

PCBSD installation (img or iso, not the installation) is 4.1 GiB

At login you can choose ftom the installed desktop environments tested in my case lumina or openbox or kde.

Yes lumina is lite but booting Fatdog64 is very much faster than booting PCBSD.

Note, BSD is not linux

@tallboy, what about Antix?

[metastasis69]

Interesting distro, I will keep an eye on new developments on this distribution. Thank you so much for sharing.

[Ted Dog]

Yeap all size is in eye of holder, I get a chuckle when someone complains that exFat mega flashdrives >32G are not supported directly with a 150M distro. I still wish Fatdog64 was thinner but if I leave here for thicker pastures and wonder how the rest of linux can do so little with so much bloat, and find myself back with the almost massive 250M Fatdog

[rokytnji]

@tallboy, what about Antix?

http://antix.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5852i

Just in case no one finds it. I have been procrastinating reinstalling my 15vAlpha and beta testing antix installs to upgrade them to 15 final before checking Lumina myself.

Too many irons in the fire so to speak. Now waiting on a Asus Flip laptop I bought for the wife. It is pretty nice with a touchscreen and usb 3.0 everywhere. Plus nice processors . A lot nicer piece of gear than I use.

But. When she gets the Asus Flip settled in and running good. I get the Dell E4310 she has, Which is not a shabby I7 laptop either with 8 gig of ram.
I'll run AntiX 15 on it. The 64 bit version. But I am a AntiX distro team member. This summer has been a busy bit of release tweaking.
MX-15 is in the works as I am typing this out. Being worked on presently.

[L18L]

Too many irons in the fire so to speak.

Me too
But I could not resist to give myself Antix a try with isobooter an an USB stick.
Very impressive!
Only one disadvantage for me ( and OP ) is with X.
Barry's Puppies and Quirkies and Fatdog64 have the generic xorg-server-modesetting driver, Antix not.thus resolution of 1024x768 only.
... and a dangerous game for wasting time

Sorry Bert, nothing new about Lumina, just other distros

[saintless]

Just quick tested yesterday on very old machine (P-III 650Mhz and 256Mb SDRAM) but Lumina seems to work well. I guess it will fly on P-IV and 512Mb RAM. Debian (Stretch/Sid) live iso image with Lumina desktop smaller than 250Mb is possible.
I'm sure someone can make even smaller Puppy-Lumina iso.
Screenshot -1

http://antix.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5852

The information there about non-resizable or non-movable widgets (note and calendar) is not correct. It is easy to move and resize wdgets after Right click - Unlock Desktop:
Screenshot -2
Clicking Lock Desktop will save the new size and position.
Lumina has great desktop tools and all tested to the moment like wallpaper changing, theme changing, screensaver setup works.
Nice WM and it is good the developers keep active debian compatible repository. It makes the testing much easier.
.

[rodocop]

Have tested Lumina under PC-BSD days ago.

Was slightly disappointed. Too much work from devs needed for now. Less configurable environment, less eye-candy, less usability.

But it's now on very early stage of the lifecycle, so... we shall just wait.

[saintless]

It would be great if someone could create a pet for Lumina!

Maybe it will be easier having working sfs for some Puppy version.
Tested only in Dpup wheezy-3.5.2.11-SCSI.iso
Lumina 0.7.2 and 0.8.7 sfs files available for download here.
Both gzip compressed. For smaller size you can use xz.
Don't test before reading the information in the link first.

Edit: Download links change.
.

[Bert]

Great stuff saintless!

I tested the Qt5-version first in ...Precise-5.7.2.( yes, I know, you warned us ) Could get to the desktop , but every action kicked me out of X again.
Then downloaded the Qt4. Much better..Lumina stayed on screen, I could navigate through the menus and get an idea in what direction Lumina is developing. It looks refreshing. Some problems: The system felt a bit slow, locking and unlocking the desktop had no visible effect: all apps opened at the top left corner, effectively covering each other. Did not find how to add the ttile bar to the apps' windows. Had to use pprocess to kill them again.
Hah, Lumina messed up my save-folder. That was something I was expecting, so I had made a backup before playing with Lumina.

Power consumption iddling was about 96 MB (of the 4GB RAM in my Atom D2550 box).

I'm in a lazy sunday afternoon mood so didn't feel motivated enough to download and install Wheezy-3.5.2.11. (moreover, my experience with woof-CE builds hasn't been very positive...)

An early conclusion? I think Lumina is a desktop environment worth keeping an eye on.

Thanks a lot for your work!

[saintless]

...locking and unlocking the desktop had no visible effect...

If you add desktop icons first you can change the icon position after unlocking the desktop. At least one desktop icon (or widget) has to be added to see the change.

...all apps opened at the top left corner, effectively covering each other. Did not find how to add the ttile bar to the apps' windows. Had to use pprocess to kill them again.

Nothing like that in Dpup-Wheezy. I guess most Puppy versions will need some tweaking in the sfs file or adding missing libs or files.

An early conclusion? I think Lumina is a desktop environment worth keeping an eye on.

I've spent some time testing and compiling all available versions and I like Lumina. The QT4 version doesn't add much size. It works well for me. I guess it is a matter of taste.

[Bert]

...locking and unlocking the desktop had no visible effect...

If you add desktop icons first you can change the icon position after unlocking the desktop. At least one desktop icon (or widget) has to be added to see the change.

...all apps opened at the top left corner, effectively covering each other. Did not find how to add the ttile bar to the apps' windows. Had to use pprocess to kill them again.

Nothing like that in Dpup-Wheezy. I guess most Puppy versions will need some tweaking in the sfs file or adding missing libs or files.

An early conclusion? I think Lumina is a desktop environment worth keeping an eye on.

I've spent some time testing and compiling all available versions and I like Lumina. The QT4 version doesn't add much size. It works well for me. I guess it is a matter of taste.

Don't get me wrong saintless: from what I saw, I also really started to like Lumina, despite the problems I experienced, that were mainly due to my stubborness to try Lumina in Puppy Precise

Maybe I should give your DebianDog another try, as a base for testing Lumina. I remember being quite excited when I tested it. In fact I jumped with joy having apt-get (and synaptic) available in what looked like the "closest-ever-to-Puppy" non-Puppy
I ran into a serious problem with it, I forgot what.. and so deleted DebianDog. (again, not critisizing, too adventurous users like me should have some sort of limited root priviliges )

Thanks again!
Bert

[saintless]

Maybe I should give your DebianDog another try, as a base for testing Lumina.

You can also try lumina-deb packages in any Debian/Ubuntu based system with working apt-get.
The sfs files work well in Dpup-Wheezy and testing Lumina in real Puppy linux is possible.
There is plenty of choice now.

Toni