Josh Saddler

Over a month since my last entry. Anyway.

The Work

I've been busy churning out the August issue of the Gentoo Monthly Newsletter, as well as a GMN Howto. This is a guide that details the process for creating the GMN, from start to finish. Over the last couple of months, it's gone from a simple 15-line cheat sheet to something a lot more useful for future GMN staff and any interested contributors.

A fair amount of documentation updates for the GDP, too. I was curiously unmotivated most of the month of August, though that's in part because of my health; I spent the first bit of it in the emergency room trying to figure out why my insides were coming apart. Still no idea.

And I've updated my devspace. Lots of changes. Lots of new stuff added and rearranged; I expect I broke some old links, but oh well. All that stuff in misc/ really needed organization.

I also poked aballier to get the new version of Decibel into the tree. Oh yeah. Upgrade to 0.11; it adds album cover art, among other things.

The Apps and the Machine

I've also been hacking up various ebuilds for packages not yet in the tree, such as tint2. This is all for my laptop, which I'm trying to slim down even more. Been removing various applications and making it much more of a minimal Xfce environment. Plus, I like pseudo-transparency. Apps like stalonetray, tint2 (ebuild available here), netwmpager, dzen2, and conky are all curiously appealing. I'm trying to find lightweight, useful, complementary apps to Xfce, in my perpetual quest to create the perfect Xfce environment.

I discovered many of these applications by reading urukrama's blog and kmandla's blog. Both are excellent sources of information on small, light apps, and setting up clean, minimal, functional environments. Quite tasty; be sure to give 'em a read. Especially urukrama's Openbox guide. It's loaded with configuration info, application tips, and much more.

The Environment

I've replaced most of my Xfce panel with stalonetray, conky, and a couple of instances of tint. I just installed dzen, and will be investigating it as a possible replacement for conky. Dzen, however, seems to need a lot of initial time-consuming configuration. And it doesn't seem to do transparency. And it doesn't look like it can even do useful fonts like Verdana.

What I'd really like to do is get rid of all but the start button on the panel, but first I need to find an icon launcher bar that does pseudo-transparency. Why not real transparency? Because compositing with the Intel X3100 graphics chip doesn't seem to be too friendly on my battery life. Actually, I'd be happy if tint had launcher capability now; I hear it's going to be in a future release. I'll just use it when that time comes.

Here's my current desktop: 1 and 2. I've managed to find a nice-looking level of transparency regardless of light or dark background, so everything's fairly clear. Too bad conky can't provide transparency and shade, similar to everything else. That left-hand panel will be going shortly; all I really need are the launchers and the start menu button. Must find a way to slim it down; it takes up too much space. Plus I don't care for vertical panel arrangements.

Since folks are always curious about what's what in any given screenshot:
Left to right: Xfce panel, stalonetray, tint, conky, and tint (just date/time). The wicd applet is anchored in the tray, and a few terminals and gtk+ apps are open in tint.
Background: (1) Liquid Crystal, (2) VSE Grass Flow.
Screen: 14.1", resolution of 1280x800. I notice that when viewing it on my 19" 1440x900 desktop monitor, the fonts look extra-large. Well, they're much smaller on the laptop. The laptop resolution is so high that I have to enlarge things considerably; my eyes aren't what they used to be.