Little fixes happening daily

Almost everyday I am fixing, tweaking or improving something in OE or EasyOS, and it often doesn't get reported to this blog. Here are a few...

Today I changed the menu back to inline. The current release of EasyOS has a cascading menu, but I have been finding it annoying. When I want to run a particular app or utility, sometimes I have to think where is that in the sub-menus, and then hunt for it. The inline submenus is more convenient.

The CUPS web interface has lots of links to help pages, but they don't work. The daemon 'cupsd' has an inbuilt http server, so take the browser to http://localhost:631 to see the web interface. The "doc root" is /usr/share/doc/cups or /usr/share/cups/doc-root -- the latter in Easy Buster and Easy OE-dunfell. This has file 'index.html' that is what you see at localhost:631

The CUPS http server is especially configured to use CGI modules, located at /usr/lib/cups/cgi-bin. I discovered that /etc/cups/cups-files.conf has a parameter "ServerBin /usr/lib/cups" so that the CUPS daemon knows where the 'cgi-bin' folder is.

It is these CGI modules that are invoked via the 'index.html' file. One of them, 'admin.cgi', provides the administration web interface. Another, 'help.cgi', is broken, as the help files do not exist.

I have fixed the web interface so that links that invoke 'help.cgi' are removed from 'index.html', so no broken links in the web interface.

In OE, I have recompiled everything, with some changes. One thing, I noticed that there are some large 'vulkan' drivers in the build. Vulkan is a replacement for opengl, but I don't know anything about it. So I added DISTRO_FEATURES_remove = "vulkan" to the 'local.conf' file. Some other changes too.

EDIT 2020-10-02:
Some more development notes...

I did a complete recompile in OE, and have built a new EasyOS. Have included SeaMonkey and Libreoffice (both of these were compiled in a running EasyOS-Dunfell, not in OE). Looks good.

As the Type1 mono font has been removed, I looked around for a good-looking TrueType mono font. Didn't much like those in DejaVu and Liberation font-sets, but found "Roboto Mono" -- very nice.

Roboto Mono is intended for nice rendering of code in text editors. using it in this latest EasyOS, and seeing it now in Geany text editor and Sakura, looks real nice.

Printing is a work-in-progress. I mentioned about the help files in the web-interface, but also was unable to print in the previous build of Easy. Will have a go at fixing it...  

Tags: easy