Ideas for improvements in future releases

[Member PPC]

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This is a bit off-topic, but yeah, I think icewm lacks a nice GUI way to change to 24H clock:

Menu > Control Centre > Edit Icewm… > “Preferences” tab > find the line that starts with “TimeFormat” > change it to
TimeFormat=”%H:%M”

For 24h clock you can also make sure the dateformat line looks like this:
DateFormat=”%r”</DateFormat=”%r”del>

DateFormat=”%R”
Edit: My typo, thanks for calling my attention to this!

Save the changes and restart Icewm

P.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by PPC.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by PPC.

[Member banned]

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@PPC

Thank you so much, it is working fine 🙂

Just had to set the TimeFormat without “” like this:

TimeFormat=%H:%M

or it shows the “” as well.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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For what it’s worth:

%r locale’s 12-hour clock time (e.g., 11:11:04 PM)

%R 24-hour hour and minute; same as %H:%M

Taken from the Format string section of the man date linux page at https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/date.1.html
FORMAT controls the output. Interpreted sequences are:
… a bunch of strings preceded by % …

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Brian Masinick

[Anonymous]

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right clicking the menu entries on any of the Window Managers antiX uses does nothing

First, I’ll mention that if you choose a “space*” sessiontype, so that spacefm manages the desktop… and visit spacefm Preferences

if you UNtick “Right click shows WM menu”,
whenever you right-click to exposed the spacefm desktop context menu,
an additional right-click on the menu will invoke “Design Mode” ~~ enabling you to add additonal custom menu items.

Second, I’ll point out that neither fluxbox nor JWM have the necessary “gui widgets” to support creation of a custom menu. I’ve considered the prospect of splitting off the spacefm “desktop menu” code, for use in a separate, freestanding, “myMenu” program… but expect it would be a wasted endeavor, because menu-dependent users would/could not manage the chore of (determining, and) supplying an appropriate launchstring for each custom item. Related: the notion of sharing / trading / installing custom items (via plugins, or whatever) is stymied by the expectation that every menu label will be pre-translated, suppied in NN languages.

[Member PPC]

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Anonymous wrote:

whenever you right-click to exposed the spacefm desktop

I was talking about new functions when right clicking the Main Menu (other than launching the selected application/opening a submenu)- but you gave me an idea- why not include a menu entry on spacefm/zzzfm right menu to launch some main apps (the default terminal and the default browser, etc – I would say even app-select too, but that’s too antiX specific)- my reasoning is, that if the user is, for some reason, without access to the main menu, the terminal is still accessible from the right click menu (it happened to me several times, when testing stuff)…

P.

[Member roland]

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Ceni does not need any ‘skin’ it just needs a few tweaks such as a button or box to show the available networks in order of signal strength at any time not just during the selection process.

Also a quick way out of the occasional need to delete /run/wpa_supplicant/wlan-name when things get tangled up as they do occasionally, also to ‘rfkill unblock all’ which I also fall foul of at times, usually my own fault.

Also when repeating a failed connexion attempt in the same window the previous message lines are progressively overwritten without racking up the display making it harder to fathom just where Ceni is at the moment.

A button on the taskbar for shortcut to a terminal window would also be handy. My main grievance is that on some of my installs desktop shortcuts created by Rox_filer appear in full, on most however only files and help appear, the rest are missing. There seems to be no pattern, I have tried waits in ‘user_desktop_session’ without success. I realise not many seem to use desktop shortcuts but I like them despite the very smart menu hierarchy available, and if a facility is known to be there I don’t see why it should not work dependably.

[Moderator BobC]

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Hi Roland,

Ceni: I’m assuming you are running the Full or Base version. With Ceni, if you are using it for Wifi in Roam mode, as I used it, there is a separate tool called WPA Gui found at the bottom of the Applications, Internet menu. It is called WPA Supplicant Configuration on the Network tab of the Control Centre. It does exactly as you are asking, and scans the available Wifi connections and lists them, and can be sorted by signal strength by clicking the column heading. When you double click a connection, it opens a window to set it up. The status window shows which you are connected to. It can also enable or disable Wifi connections and change their parameters. I wrote an explanation of how to setup and use roaming Wifi in a thread somewhere back before Connman existed because that was my go to setup. Maybe try searching for it?

Terminal Taskbar button: Try using Applications, antiX, IceWM Toolbar Icon Manager, and add an icon to your toolbar for RoxTerm or whatever terminal you use. Its pretty easy.

Desktop Shortcuts: Rox stores and handles shortcuts by storing its list of shortcuts in a file called a “pinboard”. The will only work when running the Rox-IceWM desktop. You should be able to copy and paste links to files or programs to that desktop, and as long as your changes are being save they should appear the next time you sign on. Maybe there is a bug or a configuration problem in your setup.

If you need help with any of these, I’d suggest creating a thread for that particular issue. No need to wait for “future antiX”.

[Member PPC]

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roland wrote:

A button on the taskbar for shortcut to a terminal window would also be handy.

It’s not that hard if an user wants to add that, if using an icewm desktop (the default):
Menu > Aplications > antiX > Icewm Toolbar icon manager > Add icon > Choose “rox-terminal”

That’s it. You can use the same application to move the icon to where you want it in the taskbar.

P.

Edit: Bob beated me to that answer 🙂

Also personal remark on the “Ceni” question: the current and future 19.4 and 21 antiX versions already come with a fully GUI interface to setup wifi networks that, dispite getting some bad remarks initially, at least in my case never fails to connect to a network connection… And Ceni is not made by the antiX Dev team- so it would not be pratical for them to try to “improve” its interface…
About the problems with desktop icons- I quit using desktop icons a while back, but, when I was using them, I noticed that rox-filer managed desktop icons where “quircky”… If you have a bit of RAM free, you can run a desktop managed by spacefm- icons there work like in most other distros. Also, you can try using zzzfm to manage desktop icons (it’s a spacedm fork that runs on only about 2 MB more of idle RAM than rox-file)- you can search it’s thread here in the forum.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by PPC.

[Anonymous]

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on some of my installs desktop shortcuts created by Rox_filer appear in full, on most however only files and help appear, the rest are missing. There seems to be no pattern, I have tried waits in ‘user_desktop_session’ without success. I realise not many seem to use desktop shortcuts but I like them despite the very smart menu hierarchy available, and if a facility is known to be there I don’t see why it should not work dependably.

Many users are probably unaware that MULTIPLE pinboard files exist (and we can create further additional custom pinboard files) and that each time we launch ROX we have an opportunity to append ‘-p <pinboardname>‘ to specify which pinboard we wish to load. (IIRC, this feature of ROX served as the inspiration for the “Activities” feature seen in KDE.)

ls -l ~/.config/rox.sourceforge.net/ROX-Filer/pb*

>>> on most [installs] however only files and help appear, the rest are missing
^— so investigate: which pinboard is specified in the launchstring. If none are specified, ROX will fallback to using the pb_default pinboard file, which was shipped prepopulated with only “files+help” roxicon definitions. (Mmmm, probably also an “install” roxicon. That one gets nixed during install-to-disk procedure.)

-=-
The tie-in for foootureantix topic would be a TODO bullet point titled
“figure out howto raise awareness regarding the availability of multiple ROX pinboards”

[Member roland]

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Thanks for this toolbar edit tip BobC, it made an immediate improvement to my environment. My problem is really inexperience coupled with lack of time to experiment with the myriad facilities I realise are there waiting for use. Age also comes into it!

[Member roland]

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Apologies PPC I think I am replying to the wrong post. I will now look at the Wpa-supplicant configuration, I kept away from it out of sheer ignorance, and as Ceni does everything I want as long as nothing goes wrong, and as I learned the hard way how to put things right when they do, I saw no reason to investigate further, but will now do so, thanks for pointing me in this direction.

Should I be mentioning Wicd here? I used it with much earlier releases but changed to Ceni for some reason, I cannot recall why. But Wicd appears to contain all that a comms. manager requires, and has a ‘skin’ and shows all visible wlans with signal strengths neatly, the key strings are easily visible as required, and one can connect and disconnect at will. Is it to be dropped for some reason? It no longer seems to come with the ‘full’ iso. Has it got a future?

[Moderator BobC]

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Roland, The reason I used Ceni and WPA GUI once upon a time was because it used signuficantly less memory compared to WICD.

https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/minimal-memory-roaming-wifi-by-using-ceni/

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Wicd was indeed a useful tool; I used it for many years on many different distributions.

Between memory usage (and from what I can tell) no current support, useful as it has been, it may be difficult to continue to use unless you can completely manage it yourself and potentially fix broken or out of date packages and libraries.

Ceni is a script requiring only the script language used, as mentioned.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by Brian Masinick.

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