We've discussed having a 'hold FOO while booting to bring up boot selector'; it wouldn't be hard to build in, but its not likely to be there launch firmware, but someone could add it later pretty easily using the stuff already built in. (ie: theres a script which pops up the GUI picker and sets which one to run, so just call that after detcing a key-down.)
By default, the first boot wizard asks you which environment to use; each of those environments offers some way to 1) switch to another environment, and 2) select another environment long term. (In mmenu's case, I currently let it run xfce from within mmenu (in case you want to just ge tot the desktop without changing mm from your default menu), and let you switch to xfce as a permanent menu, or run pmenu instead of mmenu just this one.
mmenu is going through a lot of hacking .. it didn't exist, what, two weeks ago? Craig wanted me to make it, so I hauled ass and got it working pretty well in a week, and now I've been pouring in some refinements, mostrly stuff thaty you can't take pictures of
It has a sensible default configuration, but massive numbes of conf items you can fiddle with .. currently:
http://git.openpando...abf69b23b0dc3e1
Minimal doesn't mean unconfigurable, just means those conf options let you craft the very specific minimal setup
by default (currently) it loads icons up front during app-scan (so takes a second or two to start up), but you can conf it to pull up icons 'later' in a background thread (so they pop up as it loads them); this slows down navigation a little (background loading and all), but makes startup near-instant, so you can change the conf if you want. Likewise, it defers preview loads now. You can have it load previews during swtart up (very slow!), or do it later when the selediton pauases and make you wait, or make it load them in a bg thread (which really chugs things up though, since thats a heavy operation.) Currently, a mount/unmount of a pnd to pull out a preview pic is slow since it has a lot to do (in case 5 apps are simultaneously mounting the samd pnd, for instance).. but we will be adding a 'fast mount' option to do read only qiuck operations for, which will speed up preview pic inhaling. Due to preview pics taking a couple seconds each to suck out (icons are instantaneous mind you), pmenu and mmenu do caching of previews to SD. mmenu has conf item to let you tell it where to cache to, or to search through multiuple locations (even USB devices attached) to find one with enough free space, so it will newver fill up your SD with caches
Theres tonnes of stuf flike that oging into mmenu, but you can't take pics of stuff like that, and DaveC is working on a skin for it, but its not ready yet (I've not seen it myself.)
I need to break the conf file in half, so that the operational-preference stuff is in the main conf, but skin-definition-stuff is in another conf,and then that conf could be duplicated for each skin, thus making skinning much easier .. but as I wrote this is a super quick hack, I still need to do stuff like that.
(All along the way, we devs kept thinking we had only weeks to ship too; I'd have coded a lot of things differently if I knew I had a year to do it... I got my dev mk2 red pcb in Dec, already past the original ship dat,e and thought I only had a couple weeks to cobble together some of the things I did. Likewise with mmenu, writing aq new menu with only weeks before shipping.. *eep*
So mmenu is shaping up very nicely and runs fast and well; I'll make pics and a video when I can I suppose.
pmenu is working very nicely.
xfce is fantastic imho, but fo my own usage I've switched to booting into mmenu, and then run xfce from mmenu when I need it
jeff
We've got about 30 or 40 apps already (half from pickle and cpasjuste, the other hallf from various people; ED has been bundling them up into pnds and keeping them, so for launch there should be a decent assortment, from Vice to Hatari to UAE to Quake 1/2/3 to Wesnoth, etc. Check my pics of mmenu and look at the icons in the screen
Edit: you can tell DaveC is beating me up, as I've added all his customizations he loves from gmenu2x .. so ytou can now create .ovr files (in the same place as their .pnd file) to override the icon name, categories and clockspeed (and eventually more options). ie: /pandora/desktop/foo.pnd, create /pandora/desktop/foo.ovr .. if the name is too wide, or you want to change it, you can just override now. This is at the libpnd level so works for xfce, pmenu, mmenu and anything else automatically. You can also drop a foo.png in the same place to override the icon (helpful for skinners), and I'll be adding it so you can override the preview pics too.
You can do category mappings in mmenu now too .. so if you want to merge Game and Apps into MyGame category you can; you can configure which categories you want to have tabs (and if you want All tab or not), and then map categories to those categories; you can set a default category so you can make your own All-like category catchall, except for a few apps which you shove into your own virtual category buckets. Sort of a big PITA, but Dave insists you all love that stuff, so I built it in. Again, not something you can take pics of, but there you go. Guy cot me a week of life to make options that 1% of people will use, but I hope you dig it
