New OS In The Making!

[1234s282]

Hey Everyone

Seeing as I am now on summer holidays and get 8 weeks off , I thought i might start experimenting making an OS for the LLL. Codename is currently MiniOS , and im still learning a lot. If anyone on here could help answer the question i have and what i have posted under the "What Needs Doing" threads , I would really appreciate your help on this

Heres some information on my project so far :-

- Main Window Manager replaced with Fluxbox
- Pcmanfm file manager still installed but Rox-filer has been installed and is default (better)
- Rox Pinboard activated so theres desktop icons
- Wireless and Ethernet Fully Working
- Auto mount USB and SD Fully Working
- Battery Status in tray (AC Power , 100% , 75% , 50% , 25% , 0%)

Still Needs Doing

- Auto Mounting USB/SD - While this works , again I would like the tray icon to appear as it does in the Default OS
- Battery Meter - The applet provided doesnt seem to work well - showed AC power half an hour after id unplugged the charger!


I will be updating this post as i progress

And finally , heres a current screenshot (v0.01 ) Note: I will also be updating this screenshot of the desktop with the most current one as i progress






Enjoy!

[cobwobbler]

That looks cool and is something I'd like to do to mine.
All I want is a simple distro that goes on the web and plays Youtube vids and Flash games.

How do you start? Or where sould I go to start learning how to make my own distro?
Cheers, Cobwobbler

[Mijzelf]

- Battery Meter - Does anybody know how to get an icon in the task tray like in the default OS?
- Auto Mounting USB/SD - While this works , again I would like the tray icon to appear as it does in the Default OS

I wrote a small applet some time ago to handle this. It works, but with a big delay. For the batterystatus this is not a big problem, but for automounting I think it will be annoying. Link

[404]

It's great to hear about another distro. Have you by any chance heard of LXDE? I think it should hold up quite nicely on these mips netbooks

http://lxde.org/

[1234s282]

Hey Everyone

Sadly my LLL died last night , will have to do a software restore!

Will look into LXDE

Thanks for the battery link Mijzelf


1234s282

[wicknix]

Although it isn't really "new" since it's just 3MX Retro with fluxbox window manager, i'm glad to see some people finally tinkering around with these things.

All I want is a simple distro that goes on the web and plays Youtube vids and Flash games.

Good luck with that. Standalone flash games in .swf format up to flash7 mostly work with the built in flash player. As for youtube... ever since youtube switched to flash10 the linvideos (video online) software no longer works. Best bet is to use the firefox plugin called 'video download helper' which downloads videos from sites like youtube and then you watch them in the media player. I had gnash (open source flash player/plugin) working awhile back, but it was horridly slow. To the point of being unusable.

Have you by any chance heard of LXDE? I think it should hold up quite nicely on these mips netbooks
http://lxde.org/

It's too heavy. Xenium used lxde and it took a good 45 seconds or more for the desktop to load. Also the lack of 'autohide taskbar' wasted valuable screen space.

Cheers.

[404]

It's too heavy. Xenium used lxde and it took a good 45 seconds or more for the desktop to load. Also the lack of 'autohide taskbar' wasted valuable screen space.

Cheers.

ah, what a shame. Been yearning for a fully featured desktop on these netbooks for a while now.

[wicknix]

What's your idea of 'fully featured'? Lxde comes with nothing that these minibooks don't already have. I use it on my desktop, but it doesn't offer anything most other window managers can't do. I chose JWM for 3MX because it's super light (1/3 the size of fluxbox/blackbox for example), ultra configurable and has that 'familiar' windoze look and feel. I find it more full featured than most actually. Add rox-filer (puts pcmanfm to shame) for a file manager with drop n drag support/wallpaper manager/desktop icons etc and you have a 'full featured' desktop.

Cheers.

[404]

What's your idea of 'fully featured'? Lxde comes with nothing that these minibooks don't already have. I use it on my desktop, but it doesn't offer anything most other window managers can't do. I chose JWM for 3MX because it's super light (1/3 the size of fluxbox/blackbox for example), ultra configurable and has that 'familiar' windoze look and feel. I find it more full featured than most actually. Add rox-filer (puts pcmanfm to shame) for a file manager with drop n drag support/wallpaper manager/desktop icons etc and you have a 'full featured' desktop.

Cheers.

I think that's all in the eye of the beholder. I'm personally not a huge proponent of LXDE. I only threw it out there as they claim to be very lite while others (such as xfce, icewm) have strayed away from being a lite richly featured desktop. Personally, when im not stuck on a winblowz machine, KDE is my choice of desktop. 

I have looked into JWM, I think what has been done along with such little resources used is great. With that said however, it probably won't ever be everybody's cup of tea.

[1234s282]

MiniOS is currently quite snappy - its based around the Default OS , which after using Retro for 3 months i was amazed how quick the default os is generally compared to Retro!!

I would still like some help regarding the battery status , as the battery app that Wicknix linked to didnt seem to want to work (It still showed on AC power 30 minutes after id unplugged it)

I also would like to ask Wicknix a question - On your 3MX distro's , using the Shutdown option on the main menu triggers what command exactly? Currently the only way i aam able to shut down the LLL properly is to switch back to the Matchbox Window Manager (Currently "Dual booting" between the default OS and my own OS) and use the shutdown button from there.

I searched and found the xip-powerdown and xip-logout files , but attempting to execute either of these from a terminal gives a lot of white text on a black background but nothing further (It looks as though its trying to shutdown but it just stops after a while)

Help most appreciated - im thoroughly ejoying this learning experience

1234s282

[wicknix]

Try /sbin/poweroff 

[1234s282]

Cheers Wicknix - that Does the job

Added Restart And Shutdown Options To The Application Menu



Appreciate everyones thoughts so far

1234s282

[cobwobbler]

OK, I need some help as I'm stumbling around in the dark here.
You guys have made some trick OS for the LLL but how do you tweak it and get it loaded onto the Elonex?
I have a Linux PC to work with, I've played with some Unetbootin to make bootable USB sticks but how do I make an .img or .rec file to load onto the Elonex?
Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious here, I'd love to play with this little box.
Has anyone played with the Linux Webbook release from Elonex?
Is that something we could use on our Elonexs?
Or Could we use some splashwear like Ghost or Hyperspace?
Help a new guy full of ideas but lacking direction.
Cheers, Cobwobbler.

[wicknix]

I initially started with the default OS as a base to build upon when i started making 3MX and this is how you do it.

Have an empty freshly formatted (fat32) SD card or USB stick handy. (512 meg or larger required)
Insert it. (if using usb, remove your sd card so as to not backup the 'entire' SD card also.)
Open xterm.
Type in: cd /
Type in: tar -cvf /USB/USB_1/backup.tar *   (or use /SD/SD_1/backup.tar * if using a blank SD card)
Wait and watch while text scrolls in xterm for a few minutes.
Your backup is complete when you get an error message (this is normal and harms nothing)

Thats it. Backup is now on SD/USB card.

Now copy that to your desktop and extract it somewhere. Edit/add/remove software (either compile them or use debian etch mipsel packages) to your liking. Repack it (similar to instructions below) and flash it to test your changes.

To make your backup.tar into a usable Recovery.img on the minibook itself do the following:
cd /SD/SD_1/  (or /USB/USB_1)
mv backup.tar Recovery    (no file extension)
bzip2 Recovery      (takes quite along time to complete)
mv Recovery.bz2 Recovery.img

Thats it. You now have a custom backup Recovery.img.

Cheers