How to fix the drive icon behaviour in recent Puppies...
Posted: Tue 22 May 2018, 11:12
Morning, all.
As the tag-line says; am I the only one to notice the somewhat odd behaviour of the desktop drive icons in recent Puppies, built with the new Woof-CE build-system?
It appears to be related to the EventManager. Over the last few years, the way it works has been been slowly altering. With the older 5-series and early 6-series Pups, if you wanted to 'refresh' the drive icons, and to re-align them, you would right-click a drive icon, and select 'Run The Desktop Drive Icon Manager'.
You would then tick the check-box for 'Refresh/Realign existing icons'. With older Pups, you then needed to restart 'X' to complete the operation. In some of the newer Pups, this got changed to merely clicking on 'OK', and the restart occurred automatically.
In some of the newest spins/remasters (I'm thinking here specifically of Sailor Enceladus' remaster of Slacko 571, and peebee's new Upup Bionic), this option has been completely removed. Don't get me wrong; I'm not criticising the Puppies themselves; I run both, and they're some of the fastest, lightest, sweetest-performing Puppies it's ever been my pleasure to use, but.....I just don't like the way the EventManager is now handling the drive icons. Maybe it's simply me, but perhaps others aren't too happy with this behaviour either?
(Things have definitely changed, since the EventManager script is now almost 100 lines shorter.....and the appearance has also been modified, too.)
------------------------------------------------------
If you carry out any operation that affects the drive icons (or even simply restarting 'X' for whatever reason), they seem to re-appear totally at random.....sometimes, overwriting each other.
With Bionic, I get this:-
With Slacko 571, this:-
Notice how sdb1 is sitting on top of sdc1.....and with the omission of the 'Refresh/Realign' option, there is now no way to correct this bizarre behaviour. Multiple restarts of 'X' don't have any effect.
----------------------------------------------------------------
This is how everything should look on my desktop; drives, as well as partitions, all in alphabetic order. This is from Slacko 570, Micko's 'original', which Sailor based his brilliant 571 re-spin on:-
Well, I've done some experimentation; and have discovered that by substituting /usr/sbin/eventmanager and /etc/eventmanager with the appropriate items from Xenial 7081 or Tahrpup 606 (efi), I've now got control back! I've just performed this 'swap' in Bionic, and my drive icons are now back to how I want them:-
I'm assuming that the EventManager is a self-contained script, since everything else appears to be working how it should. Might I respectfully suggest that this be re-considered in new Puppy builds.....or at least looked at?
--------------------------------------------------------------
For anybody who would like to 're-set' this behaviour, I've made up a .pet using the above-mentioned items from the Xenial 7081 ISO; this being the one with the 'correct' behaviour for refreshing/realigning the icons, but no need to manually restart 'X'. You can find it attached below.
The usual caveats apply for something like this. Back Puppy up, before installing the .pet.....so you can restore things to their previous condition, in case this doesn't behave itself with your particular set-up. You'll probably need to reset your drive icon positioning, if you've altered it at all, and you may need to reset any auto-mounted partition/drives with pMount; I'm not certain about that, since this has been performed with the 'existing' set-up from my own copy of Xenial.
Hope this perhaps helps some of you.
Mike.
As the tag-line says; am I the only one to notice the somewhat odd behaviour of the desktop drive icons in recent Puppies, built with the new Woof-CE build-system?
It appears to be related to the EventManager. Over the last few years, the way it works has been been slowly altering. With the older 5-series and early 6-series Pups, if you wanted to 'refresh' the drive icons, and to re-align them, you would right-click a drive icon, and select 'Run The Desktop Drive Icon Manager'.
You would then tick the check-box for 'Refresh/Realign existing icons'. With older Pups, you then needed to restart 'X' to complete the operation. In some of the newer Pups, this got changed to merely clicking on 'OK', and the restart occurred automatically.
In some of the newest spins/remasters (I'm thinking here specifically of Sailor Enceladus' remaster of Slacko 571, and peebee's new Upup Bionic), this option has been completely removed. Don't get me wrong; I'm not criticising the Puppies themselves; I run both, and they're some of the fastest, lightest, sweetest-performing Puppies it's ever been my pleasure to use, but.....I just don't like the way the EventManager is now handling the drive icons. Maybe it's simply me, but perhaps others aren't too happy with this behaviour either?
(Things have definitely changed, since the EventManager script is now almost 100 lines shorter.....and the appearance has also been modified, too.)
------------------------------------------------------
If you carry out any operation that affects the drive icons (or even simply restarting 'X' for whatever reason), they seem to re-appear totally at random.....sometimes, overwriting each other.
With Bionic, I get this:-
With Slacko 571, this:-
Notice how sdb1 is sitting on top of sdc1.....and with the omission of the 'Refresh/Realign' option, there is now no way to correct this bizarre behaviour. Multiple restarts of 'X' don't have any effect.
----------------------------------------------------------------
This is how everything should look on my desktop; drives, as well as partitions, all in alphabetic order. This is from Slacko 570, Micko's 'original', which Sailor based his brilliant 571 re-spin on:-
Well, I've done some experimentation; and have discovered that by substituting /usr/sbin/eventmanager and /etc/eventmanager with the appropriate items from Xenial 7081 or Tahrpup 606 (efi), I've now got control back! I've just performed this 'swap' in Bionic, and my drive icons are now back to how I want them:-
I'm assuming that the EventManager is a self-contained script, since everything else appears to be working how it should. Might I respectfully suggest that this be re-considered in new Puppy builds.....or at least looked at?
--------------------------------------------------------------
For anybody who would like to 're-set' this behaviour, I've made up a .pet using the above-mentioned items from the Xenial 7081 ISO; this being the one with the 'correct' behaviour for refreshing/realigning the icons, but no need to manually restart 'X'. You can find it attached below.
The usual caveats apply for something like this. Back Puppy up, before installing the .pet.....so you can restore things to their previous condition, in case this doesn't behave itself with your particular set-up. You'll probably need to reset your drive icon positioning, if you've altered it at all, and you may need to reset any auto-mounted partition/drives with pMount; I'm not certain about that, since this has been performed with the 'existing' set-up from my own copy of Xenial.
Hope this perhaps helps some of you.
Mike.