Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Currently STX is using XDM, which is ugly and lacks a lot of features that people expect. GDM and KDM are both unsuitable for a distribution aimed at really low end machines. I was in the mood to do a little C++ so have started hacking together a new login manager to solve this problem. The base is WDM, effectively replacing the wdmLogin component. It uses FLTK2 since the Equinox team is moving over to this for their 2.0 release, although being a login manager it’ll happily work with EDE 1.x (or any other window manager/desktop environment for that matter). Still a lot to do on it and once the initial fun of something new wears off it’ll probably be given a fairly low priority (the LiveCD Installer really needs finishing), so don’t expect anything too soon; that said here’s a pretty screenshot:

Ah, the lengths I’ll go to just to avoid doing some revision ;).

I’ve now setup a slapt-get repository for STX Slackware packages. This’ll make it much easier for people to test new versions and new packages of STX software. Hopefully stibs will get an official STX repository setup at some point, then packages can be migrated to it after they’ve undergone a suitable amount of testing (think Debian unstable/experimental). I’ve hacked together a neat little PHP frontend to the repository so people can easily get package details (and of course download the packages).

The repository is available at http://stx.mikeasoft.com.

A STX user (neighborlee) noticed that EDE lacked the ability to set the time format between 12 hour and 24 hour, so I quickly hacked together a patch to fix that :).

Hopefully it’ll be included in the next STX release (or possibly released as a patch before then).

STX has finally reached the 1.0 release stage:

• Distrowatch Announcement
• STX Home Page
• STX Download Page

As long as I don’t allow myself to get too distracted by those silly exam things that the University seems intent on pestering me with the LiveCD version shouldn’t be too far away :).

A while back I wrote a python module for handling the resize and rotate functions of X11; whilst looking for projects to upload to my new bazaar repository I finally got around to cleaning it up slightly. It’s now available from http://linux.mikeasoft.com/pyrandr.php. Once I’ve finished the LiveCD installer I might even have a go at rewritting my X configuration program (for which this module was created) to use PyFLTK instead of wxWidgets.

I’ve now switched from using a semi-private SVN server to publicly using Bazaar-NG which is a distributed revision control system. I’ve been gradually uploading various of my odd projects, further details are available at http://bazaar.mikesaoft.com.

Today I created a new STX LiveCD so I could test the new installer. It’s all coming along pretty nicely now, though I’m not done yet. A few little modifications I made to the basic STX install were:

• Changed the GTK theme to “Redmond” for more consistancy with FLTK programs.
• Recompiled PyFLTK so it used Xft to anti-alias fonts.
• Changed the desktop icon label font size from 10 to 12 to make it nicely anti-aliased.
• Added my patched version of eworkpanel for notification area support (still buggy, but better than nothing).
• Started looking at slapt-update-notifier; looks like I might need to hack EDE a little to make libnotify work though.
• Switched the X cursor to whiteglass since EDE seems to display the core cursor differently to everything else.
• Added a hamster to the corner ;).

I don’t know how many of these changes stibs will want to make use of though, so don’t get too attached to anything ;).

And here’s a pretty screenshot:

After much procrastination I’ve now tackled the installer backend. What had seemed like a mammoth task actually only took a couple of hours (though it is rather hackish in places). There’s still some work to do, a few bug fixes and post installation configuration stuff but it’s coming along fairly nicely now. Tomorrow I’ll grab a copy of the current installation script from RC3 and make it compatible with the new installer. I think stibs is planning on making the final 1.0 release pretty soon, so I expect the LiveCD installer won’t make it in until the next release.

Today I finally plucked up the courage to try my hand at a little busking. I caught a train up to Reading and spent about an hour in the finger numbing cold before my guitar strap broke (again). I didn’t make much money but that was as I expected, it being my first attempt, and I think I’ve learnt a fair amount from the experience.

I had my picture taken by some random person. I was pointed out by a mother to her child saying “Isn’t that exciting”. I was wished good luck by a friendly man and possibly mocked by a group of children, though that may just be my paranoia ;).

Oddly there was a large police presence in Reading when I arrived, which forced me in to an area that I think was a bit too noisey for my acoustic playing.

In-between the gut wrenching fear and the mild embarrassment I enjoyed myself and it’s definitely something I plan to have a go at again in the future (though perhaps not until the weather warms up a bit).

I finally got around to finishing the design and custom content management system for a local band’s website. The CMS is written in Python and is an extension of the work I hacked together for the West Wales LUG a while back. It offers very easy WYSIWYG editing of pages and integration of gallery and planet. It’s currently available from http://midnight.mikeasoft.com.

There’s still a small problem in Firefox 1.5 due to a change in the way the body’s background attribute is handled. This stops the cityscape appearing at the bottom of the page as it does in previous versions and in all other browsers. Setting the height of the html element to 100% fixes this for pages shorter than the height of the window but breaks any longer ones.

Sometime soon I’ll try and package it all up in an easy to install form and clean up the administration tasks a little, just on the off chance that someone else might find it useful.