Laundry list for AS 2.0 beta3
Bob McClure Jr (robertmcclure@earthlink.net)
Thu, 1 Jan 2004 23:10:27 -0600
Well, I took the plunge and downloaded and built AS v.2.0 beta3. I've
been using 1.8.11 for a long time. Very nice eye candy and (mostly)
good functionality. Here are the problems I encountered. First, my
machine:
AMD Athlon-550
256 Meg RAM
RedHat 9
XFree86-4.3.0-2.90.
Monitor "ViewSonic G790"
Device "RIVA TNT2" 1600x1200
I did a plain ./configure, taking all the defaults.
1. On startup, only the MonitorWharf comes up and is blank except for
the AfterStep logo in the top button. If I hit <Enter> or click
the mouse, it finishes loading both wharves, the pager and the
winlist. After I got the icons working (see item 5) the
MonitorWharf was populated with the AS logo and the Recycle and
RedLight icons, but none of the AS applets showed as loaded until I
made some keyboard or mouse input.
2. This is a minor config problem. As it comes out of the box, the
winlist shows up about a third of the way down from the top of the
screem, namely below the pager. Apparently the pager loaded first,
and the winlist couldn't find space above the pager. I changed the
pager geometry from -1+27 to -1+30 and the winlist was a happy
camper. Interestingly, the (stock) autoexec has winlist loading
first with a "wait" after it.
3. Shouldn't the cursor change to a vertical two-headed arrow when it
hovers over the bottom border handle? It still works ok, but
doesn't look right. This may be related to item 4.
Also, somewhere along the way of adding icon files and changing
config files, my desktop cursor is now the generic X cursor instead
of the proper arrow. Then I went to the menus and changed the look
and my cursor returned to the proper arrow. And I got my
double-headed arrows for resizing. But when I logged out and
restarted, my cursor was back to the X until I re-selected a look
from the menus.
4. This distro is missing a lot of the .../desktop/icons/*/* files.
The web site has a nice display of them, but it looks like they can
be downloaded only one at a time using several mouse clicks for
each. Have I missed an easier way to download the icons?
Before you answer, read to the end of item 5.
5. (Related to 4.) I went through ~/.Afterstep-errors and identified
the carps about missing image files, and downloaded those. I
restarted AS, but now it complains
afterstep ERROR: unable to load file
"/usr/local/share/afterstep/desktop/icons/dots/x_medium" - PNG
image format is not supported."
rpm reports that I have installed
libpng10-1.0.13-8
libpng-1.2.2-16
libpng10-devel-1.0.13-8
libpng-devel-1.2.2-16
Meanwhile, I used ImageMagick's convert utility to convert the .png
files I downloaded into .xpms and now all my wharf items have icons
and I now have window decorations.
Well, after further investigation, I find that the distro may well
have all the graphics, but some are in XML, some PNG and a few
XPM. At any rate, I didn't get all of it installed.
6. I copied the system feels/feels.DEFAULT file to my local
~/.afterstep/feels.DEFAULT and modified it to autoraise and it's
not taking effect. Then I renamed it to feels.bob and then
selected it from the menu system, and now it works. Never mind.
I'm curious though. Why would you want a selection of more than
one feel in your ~/.afterstep/?
7. My ~/.Afterstep-errors has
afterstep ERROR: failed to locate icon file default-switchwindow-light
in the IconPath and PixmapPath
However, I do have
/usr/local/share/afterstep/desktop/buttons/default-switchwindow-light
but it's XML. Is that right? (May be related to item 5.)
8. My ~/.Afterstep-errors is reporting
afterstep warning: LANG environment variable is not set - use -L
"locale" command line option to define locale
It's being launched from gdm and the LANG variable is set in
/etc/profile, specifically /etc/profile.d/lang.sh. Isn't that in
effect at that time?
9. The main page of the web site has a misspelling in paragraph 5.
Search for "actuall".
Also the "Icons, Clipart, etc." button on the left should link to
/data/desktop/index.html instead of
/data/desktop/icons/index.html. I had to use the "Go Back" link
from the latter to get to the former. Now I'd like to get all of
those graphics, too. (Item 5 again?)
10. None of the .../desktop/bars/* were installed from the
distribution. I wrote a long one-liner to convert the
.../desktop/bars/png/* files in the distribution to XPM files and
put them in ~/.afterstep/desktop/bars/. (Item 5 again?)
Before I build with debugging on so I can send a debug log, I thought
I would see if some of these could be fixed without that. Let me
know.
Cheers,
--
Bob McClure, Jr. Bobcat Open Systems, Inc.
robertmcclure@earthlink.net http://www.bobcatos.com
Prayer should be our first resource, not our last resort.
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