Ohhie Gui

[Pleng]

Hey guys

Well now I'm apparently less than 24 hours away from being back in Pandora land I thought it was time enough for me to get a little more active on the forum. And with that in mind, I'd like to introduce my concept GUI. While I don't actually have the coding ability to make it happen, I actually think this concept is entirely possible with minimal effort by bolting together various things that are already in use on people's 'doras.

First some screen shots, then some conceptial how-dos.

Now, any good GUI should be self explanitory, and I hope my concept is. But I'm sure I haven't thought of everything so please ask quetions and, of course, give any feedback (possitive or negative) as to what you think.


Now why do I beleive this to be possible with what we already have avalible?

Well, firstly we need a full screen, always maximised window manager. I'm not going to do the search right now, but people have already got minimenu working with Matchbox Window manager.

Secondly, a panel is needed. There are plenty of these around.

Finally a launcher is needed. The 'home' icon doesn't link to any integrated menu system. The 'home' is basically an external application that is loaded on startup. It is a basic launcher... when the 'games' option is selected it could lauch an appropriately skinned, more sophisticated menu, such a slightly modified minimenu to only look in the 'games' category.

The audio, music and documents could start off linking to either a file browser or a an appropriate application. Perhaps eventually dedicated interfaces could be created.

So that's my concept. What do other people think?

 

[Pleng]

Well I have made an approximation/proof of concept of the above system by hacking in matchbox's window manager into XFCE, downloading a task manager and attaching some bash scripts to launchers.

becomes:

nothing much here.... the icons on the desktop would ideally be in a side bar which would be carried over to the next page

So I've written a little bash script called showcat which searches for all PNDs with a specified category, makes links to them in a temporary directory, then opens thunar in that directory. The circled icon calls "showcat Game", the one next to it, "showcat AudioVideo". No filters or sidebars yet.

making apss full screen was a bit problematic. Right now I can't get XFCE to start up with matchbox window manager by default, I have to kill xfwm4 and force the loading of matchbox before xfwm4 manages to reload itself.

The weakest link, tasks management. I doubt I'll be able to improve the situation myself. Once you kill xfce's built in window manager its little built in task manager stops working. So I downloaded the only other task manager I could find: gpe-taskmanager . There's no documentation about this that I can find so I don't know if it's in any way configurable... right now it only shows three lines, making you scroll unnecessarily and isn't laid out in the nicest fashion. You also need to select an item, press 'switch to' or 'kill' and then subsequently press 'close' to close the task manager. Clunky, but it just about works.



So where next. These were relatively simple things to achieve. From here it could start to get tricky. What I'm thinking is of somehow killing the desktop, as well as the window manager. Then finding a nice lightweight web browser to run at start up instead. Set it to run menuless, and display the 'home' page. Then rather than use thunar to display the categories, they could be rendered as web pages along with sub-categorization etc.

Of course a dedicated application would be much better, but I wouldn't know where to begin with one of those.

 

[iampanis]

You could try using Telescope for your task switcher.

It's meant for Maemo and is thus a .deb package, but opkg can supposedly handle installing those.

I don't know what the library requirements are, though hopefully it's nothing Maemo-specific.

 

[Pleng]

package found but incompatible with the architecture configured

 

[iampanis]

Hmm, did you accidentally grab an i386 package rather than an armel one?

If not, then darn, I guess maemo packages don't work after all.

There's also a source package that could be compiled.

 

[Pleng]

it was definately an armel package. It looks like Pandora is very picky about what it's willing to install; it wouldn't install a beagle board package either.

 

[Pleng]

OK So I've had much better progress. I am now running without a desktop; just the XFCE panel combined with matchbox window manager and thunar as the built in browser.

Home. The Categories are .desktops which are stored on the NAND and copied to /tmp on session start. Creating the category links is the only real 'manual' part once the system is installed.

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Browsing categories - works nicely enough (see issues, below). Still no Side Bar or filters, though.

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Browsing the web with firefox

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Playing a game of cards

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And again the not very good task manager. It's not quite so vital now, as by removing the now redundant start menu and launchers we've created a lot more space in the icon box... it should hold more than enough icons for every day use.



​

Current Issues
The system works very nicely to be honest, aside from the task manager there is only one real issue: Thunar! It's being made to do a job it really isn't supposed to. There's no command line tools to feed Thunar a new directory to jump to. So the home icon and all the categories send thunar a message to quit (one of the few command line options it supports) and starts up a new instance. At the standard clock speed this takes a little too long but with a bit of overclocking it's ok.... but yea, you don't really wanna overclock just to run your default environment.

Also there's no way to remove the menu bar and toolbar. And, of course, adding filters and a quick launch bar to the side is impossible.

And I've removed the side bar. Which is great for this purpose. But thunar is also used to access the content of your home directory by clicking on 'browse files' on home screen. And it means there are no links to your SD cards etc...

I think ideally, short of making a custom launcher interface, I might try and find another, more customizable file browser - use that for the interface and leave thunar untouched. But it's all a matter of time...


Anyway I'm using it as my main interface - it has it's issues but it's still a far better multitasking environment, IMHO, than XFCE for a device of this size.

 

[mcobit]

If thunar makes some troubles, you could try Xfe:
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/55388-xfe/
Sebt3 compiled it some time ago as an alternative.

 

[Pleng]

Ok that looks interesting. If I can sort out the fonts issue I'll probably use that as the file explorer and just deal with Thunar's menu bars as an annoyance.

So as far as I'm concerned the OOhGui is as complete as can be. It's fully working and set up as my main gui. If anybody else is interested in giving it a go then let me know and I'll try and knock up a little install script. If not then, clearly, I wont bother!

 

[mcobit]

I would definitely try it. Please share it with us. Maybe I can help a little with the finetuning.

 

[Pleng]

OK I'll try and remember exactly what I did and then put together a BASH script to automate the process.