web technologies, open source, and security
This just shows Opera opened to the DSL Forums and ctrl-tab to show other tabs opened. The only way to get more viewing area in Opera would be to maximize it or to set my jwm tray on top to autohide (like the thin blue line at the bottom right corner).
Tweaked my desktop’s JWM configurations a bit and doubled my RAM ($3 for 256MB, how could I resist?). I added a couple menu buttons on the top tray since I use my mouse. The apps menu shows the standard DSL format (though I factored out everything). The speed menu is my fast launch with my most frequent stuff (including the content-based menu I made for laptop use). Moved the dock to the left side (gaim and opera icons shown), four desktop pager, tasklist with maxwidth set at 120, and then a full clock with date.
I set my monitoring stuff on one virtual desktop and set up htop and my tail terminals to fit around conky so I can see everything. Uptime reset over Christmas (and again for installing RAM). I’d been up 42 days since wiping the drive and reinstalling DSL.
I’m probably going to make a few more jwm tweaks, including moving the dock icons back to the right side — they’re too close to the menus and pager. I might add more menus as well to separate tasks on the tray instead of in the menu. I’m also using dfm more than I thought I would.
I thought about switching this one over to a frugal install but I’m in no rush. The only thing this computer needs is a quieter fan.
It’s out and it rocks. Quite a few changes: some filesystem modules have been moved out, changes in applications, and new icons and theme (blackandblue). The filesystem modules had no progs in MyDSL so nobody should even notice they’re gone. As far as applications go, mtpaint replaces xpaint. Plenty of folder icons if you don’t like the default color scheme. There are many more improvements.
I burned the ISO pretty fast to give it a quick spin. Now running installed HDD-USB. Here’s a first screenshot, lucky-style with the tray on top.
More later.
Since re-installing DSL 4.0, I’ve come to appreciate the ease of customizing a JWM-based environment. JWM is now the default window manager for DSL. JWM is very light on resources and very customizable — from its appearance to its menuing to setting up trays.
I think one shortcoming is how its menuing system is in the .jwmrc file. I’d like to see that fully separated so the menu is distinct from the configuration file. Fortunately, that “weakness” can be remedied using the “strength” of the INCLUDE tags since JWM uses XML (very easy to edit and configure as one sees fit) — it’s a call by the distro’s developer and/or user. DSL uses an INCLUDE tag for the tray and another for the MyDSL part of the menu, but continues put the main menu in jwmrc.
I moved all of my menu out of jwmrc and also INCLUDE a separate tray (see top photo in my previous entry) in the bottom right hand corner. The reason I did that was to minimize the height of the tray across the top without compressing that tray’s icons so much that they become illegible. It also allows me to add more icons without cluttering up the top tray and stealing space from the task bar part of it. The bottom right tray is on autohide so it doesn’t stake a claim to screen real estate and I can make it big enough to show decently-sized icons — the icons are about 16 pixels with the top tray set at 24 pixels, but they’re closer to 28-30 with the bottom right set at 34. I’ve since moved all the icons from the top tray and extended the tray on bottom to include more applications.
I’ve only started playing with some of the configurable variables. You can group applications together so they share the same options, such as making them “sticky” (same as “pinning” to every virtual window), opening all instances of applications in that group to the same size, using the nolist variable to prevent them from showing up in the task list, and using the same icon for their common window decoration.
The one I have played with more extensively is setting up key bindings (see my posts in this thread at the DSL forums) so I don’t have to grab my mouse much — except when I use Rox. JWM is very keyboard-friendly.
(I use mouseless window managers on my laptop. I would use Ion more, or even exclusively, if it wouldn’t require me to rebind its default keys; Ion uses many of the function keys used by console applications. Ratpoison is more agnostic and uses GNU Screen-like bindings so its very familiar and more friendly with a strictly keyboard operation.)
There’s one feature I’d like use but JWM doesn’t have it. The task list only allows right and left insertion. I want one that drops down menu-style so more space on the tray can be used for other things (such as swallowed apps). I have a couple ideas how I can hack that, and I wonder if I might be able to INCLUDE some call JWM uses to build the task list to accomplish the same thing.
This is a batch of attempts to fix some of the weirdness that occurred when indexing the colors. Whoever came up with a 224 limit probably uses a Mac.
One more before I race the rats, another boot logo:
Here it is indexed at 224 colors…
This is the center part of a wallpaper. I can tweak the colors, fonts, and layout if anyone has suggestions.
I would put these on a page but still having WordPress database issues. Here’s the first one for the day. EDIT: The rockin’ globe is from Erioll’s Designs via WikiMedia Commons — much thanks.
I took this one while ago while playing around with ideas for DSL4 logos and wallpaper. I was going to include it on the page from this morning, but blogsavy isn’t letting me edit files today.
