xfce in mepis 11

Finally got around to installing Xfce in Mepis 11. Had a lot of fun setting it up and tweaking it.

I added Desktopnova to handle timed, automatic wallpaper changing. When I sat down to the computer this morning, this was the view on my desktop:

That's a shot of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque during the Balloon Fiesta. Magnificent!

sid/semplice

My "experiment" with Semplice Linux has me looking a lot more closely at the whole Debian Unstable (Sid) concept. I'm learning some things, but I don't know how long I'll be able to keep things running. As I've mentioned, Semplice uses the "Unstable" repos.

Check out this page: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable

That page could scare anyone away from using Debian Unstable. Right after reading it, I installed apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges in Semplice. I also visited the Debian Weather page.

Here's a good piece of info I found at the wiki page mentioned above:

How do I backport a sid package to testing or stable?

Install the Debian source (and the development tools, especially debhelper, devscripts, and build-essential), and then build the package.

Step by step:

add a deb-src line for sid to your sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get build-dep PACKAGE_NAME
apt-get -b source PACKAGE_NAME

The resulting debs should be in the current directory and can be installed with dpkg -i the.deb.

That'll probably come in handy.

mirage

While playing around with Semplice Linux, I got a chance to try its default image viewer, Mirage.  Nice. I'll probably install it in my other distros as well, if possible.

Here's the Mirage web site: http://mirageiv.berlios.de/

Billed as "a fast and simple GTK+ image viewer, Mirage comes with its fair share of features, including cropping, flipping, rotating, resizing, zooming, taking screenshots, and more. It's available in the Debian Squeeze, Wheezy, and Unstable repos, and in the Ubuntu Hardy, Lucid, Maverick, Natty, Oneiric, and Precise repos. Also, I found it in the Fedora 16 repos. It doesn't bring in much in the way of dependencies, either.

Here's a screenshot, with the thumbnail pane open:

semplice menu

The menu in Openbox in Semplice Linux 2.0.1 ("emily") is not the default Openbox menu, although you can copy that menu from /etc/xdg/openbox/menu.xml to ~/.config/openbox, edit it if necessary, and use that instead. You'll want to make a copy of the menu.xml file that's already there, in case you want to go back to using the Semplice menu.

The default ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml calls the "alan-gentree" menu, which is located at ~/.config/alan/tree.conf. I wanted to do two things with this menu: Add the Debian menu, and add a few application entries to the menu. Semplice forum member Eugenio (aka "g7") helped me with this.

For the Debian menu, first you have to make sure that the Debian menu package is installed (it was). Next, I added the following to the extensions area, right after the "[ext:desktop]" section:

[ext:debianmenu]
## debian-menu
ext = __menu__
name = Debian
id = /Debian
icon = distributor-logo

Then I edited the "extensions" line of the "[cat:one]" section to add a spacer and "debianmenu" to the menu:

[cat:one]
## First part of the main category:
##   apps: provides an easy way to startup popular programs like the
##         Web Browser and the Terminal Emulator
##   xdgmenu: Applications menu
##   places: Places menu
##   desktop: Workspaces menu
name = STOCK_NULL
extensions = apps - xdgmenu places - desktop - debianmenu


Next, I had to go to ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml and find this section:

<!-- You can specify more than one menu file in here and they are all loaded,
       just don't make menu ids clash or, well, it'll be kind of pointless -->
    <!-- default menu file (or custom one in $HOME/.config/openbox/) -->
    <!-- system menu files on Debian systems -->
<file>menu-static.xml</file>
    <file>menu.xml</file>

I changed it to this:

<!-- You can specify more than one menu file in here and they are all loaded,
       just don't make menu ids clash or, well, it'll be kind of pointless -->
    <!-- default menu file (or custom one in $HOME/.config/openbox/) -->
    <!-- system menu files on Debian systems -->
    <file>/var/lib/openbox/debian-menu.xml</file>
    <file>debian-menu.xml</file>
    <file>menu-static.xml</file>
    <file>menu.xml</file>


Next, here's how I set up the "[ext:apps]" section of ~/.config/alan/tree.conf to add PCManFM, Mousepad, and Synaptic to the menu:

[ext:apps]
## Display a list of common apps (Terminal Emulator and Web Browser)
ext = __itemlist__
name = STOCK_NULL
count = 5

icon1 = terminal
item1 = STOCK_TERMINAL_EMULATOR
item1_ex = x-terminal-emulator

icon2 = web-browser
item2 = STOCK_WEB_BROWSER
item2_ex = x-www-browser

icon3 = pcmanfm
item3 = PCManFM
item3_ex = pcmanfm

icon4 = mousepad
item4 = Mousepad Text Editor
item4_ex = mousepad

icon5 = synaptic
item5 = Synaptic Package Manager
item5_ex = gksudo synaptic


So, here's my current Semplice desktop, showing the new menu:

touchpad off in openbox

The touchpad on my notebook annoys me. I prefer to use a mouse. To keep it turned off in Openbox in Semplice Linux, I added the following to my ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh, right before the last line of the script:

#turn touchpad off
synclient TouchpadOff=1

Alternatively, the following command turns it off during the Openbox session:

$ synclient TouchpadOff=1

And, of course, to turn it back on, change the "1" to a "0" in the above command.

For a list of synclient settings:

$ synclient -l

And, finally, for more info, there's always man synclient.

gnome shell extensions update

Yesterday, I brought in a GNOME Shell upgrade (to 3.2.2.1-1.fc16) in Fedora 16, so I decided to take a look at the GNOME Shell extensions on my system -- to see which ones might have been rendered incompatible by the upgrade, and to see which other ones I still might want to keep.

All of the extensions that I installed from the Fedora repos still work fine, of course. These include:

- alternative-status-menu (turned on)
- apps-menu (turn on, but hardly ever used)
- dock (turned off)
- icon-manager (turned off)
- user-theme (turned on)
- workspace-indicator (turned on, but hardly ever used)

As for the extensions that I installed from the GNOME Shell Extensions web site, one of them, Panel-Docklet, is no longer compatible. I removed it. I also removed the Window List Extension. Neither one of those are extensions that I've been actually using, anyway.

I added one very nice extension from the website, called Quit Button. This extension replaces the user name and status icon with a "quit" button.

There's no way to easily uninstall the extensions that you've installed from the web site; to get rid of them, I had to delete them from ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions.

One pleasant surprise was that the web site now works with Google Chrome, which, in Fedora 16, I have updated to version 18.0.1025.11 beta. Before, I had to access the web site using Firefox.

I still feel that I'm better off without much in the way of GNOME Shell extensions. I like the way GNOME Shell is set up, and there are only a few extensions that are helpful to me.

semplice

Well, today I installed a new distro, called Semplice Linux 2.0.1 ("emily"), on my notebook. It's based on Debian Unstable, and comes with the Openbox window manager. This one originates from Italy.

2.0.1 dates from only January 20th. There's a pre-release available at the download page for the 3.0 Alpha 1, but I decided not to go for that. I chose the 32-bit .iso, but there's a 64-bit available.

In all the time I've been using Debian and Debian-based distros, I've stayed away from the Testing and Unstable branches. I've also stayed away from distros from places where English isn't the native language, with forums and documentation in mind.

But, something about this one attracted me. Maybe it was because I like Openbox. Maybe because Semplice is practically a brand new distro. I took a look at the forums, and what little documentation was out there, and it looked like there's enough support for an English speaker, so I decided to download the .iso.

I burned it onto a CD instead of to a flash drive. I booted into it, and it worked fine with my notebook. So, I decided to go ahead with the installation. Had nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon (well, I did, but...).

The installer was all text, but it was really easy. It seemed like one of the easiest installations I've done, and one of the quickest. Proves that there's no reason a text installer has to be difficult.

Let's see. Semplice, by default, comes with the Chromium web browser, the PCManFM file manager, and Gnumeric and AbiWord instead of LibreOffice. Openbox doesn't come with a panel, so they included the tint2 panel. And it comes with Synaptic.

And, one thing I haven't seen outside of the Ubuntu world (which includes Linux Mint), they use sudo by default instead of su, so there's only one password and the root account is disabled by default, like in Ubuntu.

The default desktop is plain. You right-click on the desktop for the menu, but other than the panel, there's nothing there.

I'm cool with that. I don't like desktop icons or any other type of clutter on my desktop.

I checked out the default repos. In /etc/apt/sources.list:

http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

And in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/semplice.list:

deb http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/project/semplice-linux/archive/ emily main non-free

deb-src http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/project/semplice-linux/archive/ emily main non-free

I disabled the deb-src repo, as I won't be needing that.

I went to Synaptic to get the upgrades, and found 240 of them. Not surprising. I brought 'em all in, rebooted, and got down to exploring the system a little bit.

The distro ships with a few Xfce packages, like mousepad, xfburn, xfce4-power-manager, and xfce4-screenshooter. There's no pager for switching workspaces, but I found three other ways to do that -- by scrolling with the mouse wheel; ctrl+alt+(left or right) arrow key; or, by getting to a different desktop via the main menu, under "Desktops." The default terminal emulator is ROXTerm 1.22.2; I also found UXTerm and XTerm. It came with Exaile and GNOME MPlayer.

I haven't used PCManFM much in the past, but it seems like a nice file manager. I'd like some split-screen capability, but it has tabs -- very helpful.

I was happy to see that root access to files and folders was nicely built-in; in PCManFM, there's an option under Tools to "Open Current Folder as Root," and there's a root terminal in Semplice's main menu under Applications > Accessories.

By no means am I intending for this to be a distro review; if I did reviews, I certainly wouldn't do them on the first day after doing an installation. And I won't take the time to go through and test the various apps and to look for hardware issues (for example, I don't even use wireless, and I haven't tried using a printer with this installation).

It does look like a nice distro, though. I'd prefer to find something like this based on Debian Stable, but it'll be good for me to see how things go with something based on Sid. Should be interesting.

The Semplice home page: http://semplice-linux.org/