LXDE - Pretty Good

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jamie81
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LXDE - Pretty Good

Post#1 by jamie81 » 06 Jul 2016, 01:47

istinnjazz , I have been working with the LXDE x64 version today, and I must say its quite good!

I got video thumbnails working, took a while(why do I have the hardest time on a persistent usb distro with this, but not nearly as often with a regular harddrive installed distro? lol).

I did everything I was supposed to for pcmanfm to get video thumbnails, ffmpegthumbnailer etc(googled a lot, but It was mostly things I had came upon before so pretty much already knew what to do). I couldnt get them to show though until I just said what the heck and went ahead and updated the system using PAMAC. As soon as I did that, boom, they started showing.

LXDE is fast and with a bit of adding some icons(numix), I got it looking pretty good. LXDE is actually growing on me quite a bit because of your suggestion to try it out. Thanks! I love the speed, and with the arch repos I can add most of what I want that I miss from more bloated desktop environments. Very nice!

I really have only one really nagging issue here. It appeared after I updated the system with PAMAC. It seems like it would be a theming issue, but im no expert and after googling quite a bit I havent really nailed down the cause yet. I have some screenshots for you. Something has gotten a little borked and Im almost a 100% sure it was after the update with PAMAC.

http://imgur.com/a/exjte

There are 3 screenshots.

The first screenshot: The network icon in the system tray. As you can tell the right click menu for it is borked, definitely seems like some sort of theming issue. Ive tried changing themes and the like, it doesnt seem to alter it at all. When you hover the mouse over an option it does not highlight or anything either. Also, the tooltips when hovering over the icon is the same dull grey as the menu. Just to note, not all icons in the tray or panel for that matter are showing the same problem.

Screenshot 2: Here you have PAMAC. As you can tell the titlebar area is messed up. Only some applications are doing this. PAMAC and some others. There are quite a few that are acting just normal. Transmission for example is showing a similar type problem. I didnt screen shot that one though. I can later if you would like to see. I would think this is some kind of gtk theming issue or something, but Im not sure what to do about it. Ive tried googling things related to this as well.

Screenshot 3: Here you see the right click menu for Guake icon in the systray. It is behaving completely normal. Thought Id show you this just to show that some icons and applications are behaving normally. (most applications are behaving fine). Also the tooltip when hovering over Guake icon in the systray is the normal yellow color that was the default on fresh boot.

I can say without a shred of doubt that nothing in my modules folder is causing this issue. I have booted without the save.dat container and just using modules and rootcopy and the issue is gone. So I was left to assume it had to be the system update with PAMAC that caused this. Interestingly enough, I lost video thumbnails in pcmanfm when I booted without the save.dat container also. This also reinforced my belief the update finally got the thumbnails working(I had already added ffmpegthumbnailer before the update of course).

I have been using pman whenever possible so as to isolate any potential changes that may break something into modules I can just remove if something bad happens. I however didnt know if I could do a system update using pman or if it would be wise to do so. So I used regular system update through PAMAC.

Sorry for such a long winded post. I wanted to be thorough and describe the issue well. Its not an end of the world issue, but nagging and Id really like to figure it out and hopefully learn how to fix anything similar in the future. Thanks for the time and any ideas you may have on this. Thanks again for suggesting LXDE Nemesis, its great!

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Re: LXDE - Pretty Good

Post#2 by ncmprhnsbl » 06 Jul 2016, 07:27

looks like a gtk3 issue (recent upgrade to 3.20 broke themes ) -- pamac is a gtk3 app i think..
try installing adwaita(the gtk3 default) or vertex gtk theme...(you may need to logout/in for it to take)
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Re: LXDE - Pretty Good

Post#3 by istinnjazz » 06 Jul 2016, 11:08

@jamie81,
This is good news, all the process you did is a good learning experience. Remember to take backup of your save.dat or partition if you do minor or major updates in case system breaks down. It is not that rare on a rolling distro.
If you wanted to go back, without a backup, you had to face again all the steps you did before the major update. Backap in this case is a simple file copy of the container.
If you choose to create and use xzm files in parallel with the container there are some considerations you have to care about, and some issues you have to deal with.

The theming issue (and some other issues) has been described here:
viewtopic.php?f=137&t=5382&start=225#p45543

ncmprhnsbl is right, update or choose an other theme from repository. With gtk3 3.20 I use "Vertex" and "Vertex-Maia". Try to install relative icon packages also.
Do it from pacman if pamac is that broken, but I think menus work even if the icons/graphics are not there.
Then use LXAppearance: "customize look and feel" to change themes/icons

Code: Select all

root /home/guest # lxappearance
Take a look @ bug reports and participate if you like. You will find interesting stuff there, some issues for pcmanfm might interest you also.
You can also try:
viewtopic.php?f=138&t=5954


For now I had restored my system from a backup to a pre - full update era, to update individual packages manually in order to understand some issues, you do not have to do this of course and it is not generally recommended.

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Re: LXDE - Pretty Good

Post#4 by istinnjazz » 06 Jul 2016, 13:45

for pcmanfm
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCManFM
viewtopic.php?f=137&t=5382&start=285#p46819

for arch file manager functionality:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fi ... ctionality

for the documentation search you do about a package or software..
add the word "arch", so the search engine it will get you directly to the arch wiki, a huge documentation databased covering almost everything.
example: "pcmanfm arch"

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Re: LXDE - Pretty Good

Post#5 by istinnjazz » 08 Jul 2016, 06:37

From the manjaro development team

Code: Select all

Troubleshoots

GTK3

With this we updated Gnome and GTK to 3.20. This will break most of the themes, which will be fixed if and when their developers decide to update them. Some GTK 3.20-compliant themes are ready now - see further down this post.

The new default Manjaro GTK theme, which is GTK 3.20 compatible, is Vertex-Maia

You can install it with:

sudo pacman -Sy vertex-maia-themes vertex-maia-icon-theme xcursor-maia

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Re: LXDE - Pretty Good

Post#6 by jamie81 » 08 Jul 2016, 13:17

istinnjazz wrote:From the manjaro development team

Code: Select all

Troubleshoots

GTK3

With this we updated Gnome and GTK to 3.20. This will break most of the themes, which will be fixed if and when their developers decide to update them. Some GTK 3.20-compliant themes are ready now - see further down this post.

The new default Manjaro GTK theme, which is GTK 3.20 compatible, is Vertex-Maia

You can install it with:

sudo pacman -Sy vertex-maia-themes vertex-maia-icon-theme xcursor-maia
Been meaning to post back here, sorry been a few days. I have tried numerous gtk3 themes and they all seem to fix the issues with certain applications titlebar areas being borked. I have a screenshot though of something that is still weird with systray application menus, but only some of them.

Image

See the arrows, its like the right click menu of PAMAC thinks I need an overflow scroll bar as there are to many menu entries or something. Its kinda like how some bookmark menus add the arrows once you get so many bookmarks that they overflow. Its strange. It actually renders the right click menu of PAMAC unusable as the arrows are so close together you never get to actually see an option to click on. I would think some setting somewhere needs to be altered or something, but Im not really sure. I just end up going back to Zukitwo as at least the options are clickable, but incredibly ugly. So still trying to get my head around this issue.lol

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Re: LXDE - Pretty Good

Post#7 by istinnjazz » 08 Jul 2016, 13:43

I had seen this also. But i do not exactly remember how i had solved this.
Ideas,
a different icon packge
reinstall gtk2
or change all lxde related packages to their gtk3 version

jamie81
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Re: LXDE - Pretty Good

Post#8 by jamie81 » 08 Jul 2016, 13:55

istinnjazz wrote:I had seen this also. But i do not exactly remember how i had solved this.
Ideas,
a different icon packge
reinstall gtk2
or change all lxde related packages to their gtk3 version

Well at least I know its not just me.lol Ill try some of your ideas when I get a chance.

Before I do I need to figure out something about my save.dat. I need to either make it larger, or move away from it to native linux filesystem. Im at less than a gig left of it and I dont want to get any lower so Im taking it easy on packages, which Im mostly using pman so that I can have everything in modules. That system update did a number on my space. I wish I wouldve tried to pman the update, we can do that if we want right? Though, on second thought, that would make booting up Nemesis really slow wouldnt it?

I think I may need to make two partitions on the card maybe. One that can be accessed by any computer, and one linux for Nemesis on this usb drive. I looked around a little but didnt see how to set up changes without actually using a save.dat. Do you have any thoughts on any of this. Just trying to figure out which direction I should go.

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Re: LXDE - Pretty Good

Post#9 by istinnjazz » 08 Jul 2016, 19:01

You can resize save.dat
check this post:
viewtopic.php?f=137&t=5382&start=270#p46355
and take a note on a potentially dangerous situation when the container has left zero free space, leads to corrupted file system. =@

...
Copy your current save.dat file in an other directory or device. You will loose your current session changes but you will revert to the previous one. Porteus saves changes only on exit.
cd to this directory. Resize your container e.g. by a new value. If for example you had 1GB file and you want to increase the size by 256MB use:

Code: Select all

resize2fs save.dat 1256M
You cn to do this in a nosavefile boot session, or copy and replace as mentioned above.

For the increased save.dat size check this post also:
viewtopic.php?f=137&t=5931

If you want to try partitions you can try it. I do not use it for now for various reasons, mostly portability and easy copies.
jamie81 wrote:changes without actually using a save.dat
I have seen some discussion about this saving all changes as a module snapshot, this could decrease container size, but I do not use it or have ever tried it. It seems it has some advantages and disadvantages as a method of daily system use. But it could be automated somehow in the future with useful results.
jamie81 wrote:I wish I wouldve tried to pman the update
I am not sure pman supports this at this time, I haven't try it, do this if you like and report back.

I think pman it supports only individual packages or groups and only if the have not been downloaded in pacman cache, if a package has been downloaded, it reacts as pacman . So if you use it in a clean system, do not use pman a second time if something gets wrong or you have to delete pacman cache for a re-update or recreate xzm on an already downloaded (installed or not) package. (an issue to be resolved in the future I guess).
For example on an updated system you cannot create xzm out of any of the downloaded packages.
I would be good if could confirm some of those issues in case you try them.

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Re: LXDE - Pretty Good

Post#10 by jamie81 » 09 Jul 2016, 01:26

The resize2fs command didnt work for me. I didnt screenshot the error message as I jumped right in to find another way to do it.lol I do recall it was an error message about a not valid magic blocksize or similar. I imagine there is a terminal log somewhere right? Possibly could get it from there. I did google it and seen that resize2fs doesnt work with xfs filesystem, which was the default filesystem selected when I created the save.dat file, so I left it at that. I found another option through google called, xfs_growfs. That wouldnt work either.

I ended up backing up what I had, reformatting the usb thumb drive to ntfs so I could resize larger than 4gb. I then loaded a generic Porteus Mate on another thumb and just used the Porteus Save File Manager to resize a couple gb bigger. That got it taken care of thankfully. I thought I somehow managed to break my network connectivity, but then realized I accidentally popped my cat5 internet cable loose when plugging the other thumb drive in.lol Im going to stream some shows tonight and quit while Im ahead.lol

Ill be hacking around with it again tomorrow. I really wanna solve this gtk theming issue without having to start over. Ill however be creating backups of my save container going forward so I can tinker around without borking everything, and using modules for everything possible as Ive been trying to do, that way I can easily back out anything dumb I may do. Anyhow, tonight I have it going good and am going to stream some shows with Nemesis.

By the way, is work on this going to continue from brokenman and others? I like the freedom of Porteus mixed in with the wide options of software with Arch and the AUR. This has the makings of something very good. Nemesis on LXDE here is already very functional and usable every day for me, so I really hope brokenman starts back on this after the Porteus final gets released, whenever he gets back. :beer:

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Re: LXDE - Pretty Good

Post#11 by istinnjazz » 09 Jul 2016, 06:42

I do not know how efficient is xfs in a save.dat. I am using ext4 and i will use probably the safer but slower btrfs in the future. I have tested it succesfully but you have to recompile kernel for this.
viewtopic.php?f=140&t=6000
As for developers return on this project, it is possible. You have to wait at least for a stable release for the Slackware brother. There has been much of discussion about future plans and i am positive that there will be an evolution plan. For now do not forget you are in an alpha stage of development , but its form is pretty stable as you have already noticed. This is a good sign.

As a rolling release you could use this one for years if you are carefull. Internal tools have of course many possible ways of improvement.

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