Barry Kauler on His Distro Development Work

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 05, 2024,
updated Sep 07, 2024

• Barry Kauler ☛ Retain icons when switch rox to jwm

  I posted a couple of days ago about revisiting the icon-free-desktop mode, also known as jwm-mode:

  We have been discussing this on the forum:

  https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=12573

  If the user creates icons on the desktop while in rox-mode, now when switch to jwm-mode those icons appear in the tray. Before, they got left out.
  

• Barry Kauler ☛ Appi and Flapi icon-free-desktop aware

  In the last few days, have posted about scripts becoming aware if in icon-free-desktop mode (jwm-mode): [...]

• Barry Kauler ☛ Orange-ball menu entries restructured

  Orange-ball menu entries are "important" native apps available via PKGget and not yet installed. There have been posts about them, including here:

• Menu entries for not-yet-installed apps — July 09, 2023

The way this works is there is a menu entry, for, say, "Scribus", and there is /usr/share/applications/scribus.desktop file. This file causes the orange-ball icon to display in the menu entry, and when chosen, /usr/bin/scribus.install will execute. This script will offer to install Scribus.


• Barry Kauler ☛ appi and flapi script path changes

  This is a "under the bonnet" thing that I have wanted to do for some time. It's of interest to developers, not users.

  The folders /usr/local/appimage and /usr/local/flatpak have been changed to /usr/local/appi and /usr/local/flapi, and the scripts therein changed from appimage to appi and flatpak to flapi.

Update

A couple more:

• Fix hardware clock profiling

  Forum member FeodorF reported the problem and Caramel found the solution: [...]

• DroidSansFallback TrueType font

  The guys have been discussing support for Chinese language in EasyOS (and Puppy):

  https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=12555

  Typing Chinese characters is one thing, displaying them in web pages is another. I'm just tackling the latter for now.

  EasyOS has TrueType fonts in /usr/share/fonts/TTF folder. I hunted online for TrueType files that support traditional and simplified Chinese, but they are all very big, 12 to 40MB. The mainstream ones anyway. However, I found one that is very small, Droid Sans Fallback, that was used in early releases of Android. Android replaced it with Roboto.

And 2 more today:

• Brave browser added to Flapi

  Flapi is the flatpak installer, run via the desktop "pkg" icon, or via the menu "Setup -> Flatpak Installer".

  The Brave web browser has been discussed on the forum and the flatpak tested by FeodorF to work in EasyOS: [...]

• PKGget icon-free-desktop aware

  When uninstall a package, if an icon is in the tray in jwm-mode, remove it. Commit: [...]