A clean screen for netbooks

I am working on a different desktop for Quirky, that is more usable for small widescreen netbooks.

A tray along the bottom or top (or even worse, both) is not the best for a small wide-screen, as there tends to be more "free space" not required by windows at the sides.

Then of course we have icons on the desktop, and windows have to be dragged aside to get at them.

I was inspired by Jemimah to take another look at using the ROX panel instead of the JWM tray. Right now I'm playing with a panel on the right side, the drive icons moved down slightly so they are right at the bottom of the screen, and all the other desktop icons removed.
...I'll probably upload the first Quirky ISO with this.

For the record, the packages required are:

libwnck-2.26.2-p4.pet
rox-clib-2.1.10-q1.pet
rox-clib_DEV-2.1.10-q1.pet
rox-menu-0.5.0.pet
rox-monitor-applets-1-p4.pet
roxpanel-pager-1.2-p4.pet
rox-panel-quirky-1.pet
roxpanel-systray-0.3.2-p4.pet
roxpanel-taskbar-0.4-p4.pet

These will be available on my ibiblio Quirky site.

'rox-panel-quirky-1.pet' has configuration stuff to set things up properly for Quirky.

Most of the other packages are just Jemimah's packages re-badged.

I don't know if I'll stay with this though, due to the size overhead. Next, I might experiment with a JWM tray on the right side. We'll see...

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Comments

Quirky


Re: dialup
Username: BarryK
"No. You need the full Puppy for that. Many of the dialup drivers are too big. I haven't compiled them for the 2.6.31.5 kernel anyway. If I did do a Quirky build with the 2.6.30.5 kernel (same as 4.3) then perhaps all of those big modem drivers could be in a separate 'zdrv' SFS file. But, that's not my priority. It may interest someone else to build such a Quirky/Tpup. I must emphasise that Quirky is not intended to cater for a wide audience as the mainline Puppy does.

Quirky Desktop
Username: ttuuxxx
"Hi Barry, being the code hacker that you are :) What would make a nice WM is. XFCE minus thunar replaced with ROX :) Also the developer of XFburn is somewhat slow at adding features, really all it needs is the multisession feature, the backend can handle multiseesion, just that the gui doesn't have the feature and the burning backend is smaller than the puppy norm. If you could do that you would have a very nice functional lite desktop, That laptop batteries would love, compared with high resource gtkdialog apps. Well its just an idea. ttuuxxx P.s I have the whole sources of directory of www.puppylinux.ca on my hdd, so If you can't find any other sources feel free to ask. ttuuxxx

XFCE and ROX-Filer
Username: BarryK
"I did that sometime ago. I think it was one of the early alphas of 4.0. I don't recall if I documented it. Hmmm, I only posted these: http://bkhome.org/archive/blog2/200812/for-the-xfce-fan.html http://bkhome.org/archive/blog2/200812/back-to-xfce.html ...it mentions a menu icons problem, but I might have fixed that. dogone, Yes, that would be nice, I don't know of any way of doing it though.

Turbopup Xtreme has the best desktop (JWM based)
Username: panzerpuppy
"Barry, check out the ultra fast puppy derivative: Turbopup Xtreme v1.0 :) http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=40477 It has just about everything you're looking for: a minimalistic JWM-based desktop optimised for Wide and small screens.

FLWM - Lightweight and Netbook Friendly
Username: Jemimah
"Barry, have you had a chance to look at FLWM? My build of it is considerably less buggy than the standard version. It has titlebars on the side of the window, and the pager and tasklist on the root menu instead of a panel. If you haven't already, you should check out my Fluppy Window Manger Pack. A few of the things I'm working on are probably too quirky even for a Linux called "quirky," but there are some unique and interesting ideas there for making limited screen space more comfortable. http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=365466#365466

Tags: quirky