Crafting my own desktop

[hazel]

I'm having a great time putting together my very own desktop on top of a basic Debian system. I can thoroughly recommend it as a learning experience.

I take what I can via synaptic but I've had to compile some things I wanted from source and some things I'm having to write myself; I found that gksu comes with half the gnome libraries attached so I wrote a little thing called "gksu-not" which just collects a password graphically and prints it to standard output. By piping this into sudo, I can get gui access to things like shutdown and synaptic. Of course I'm using my barbarella button bar and I'm making a simple mount tool to go in the fluxbox slit, based on the one I found in dsl.

I don't think I've had this much fun with Linux since I started using Ubuntu!

[jayd512]

Hi, hazel!
I'm assuming that when you have a finished product we'll get to see a screenshot?

[hazel]

OK, several days of frantic work are finished! And I must say I like the results. I've posted a link to the running thread on desktops but here's a brief explanation of what I've done:

This is a practical desktop - no sound, no wallpaper, no eye candy. I have four named workspaces for transacting different types of business, each with a different Barbarella buttonbar (one advantage that Barbarella has over desktop icons). The applications were mostly chosen for small size and independence from gnome, etc. Some are old X warhorses and none the worse for that. For example, my file manager is emelfm, my terminal is rxvt, my editor is leafpad...

On my manuals workspace I have two very clever tk-based viewers for man and info pages, as well as xpdf. On the system page, root access to certain functions is via sudo with my gtk-not applet as front end. The default and system buttonbars also have an "anything" button which launches the fbrun command box.

The two applets in the slit are both mine: a mount tool with the look and feel of the one in DamnSmallLinux and a trashcan. And instead of wallpaper, I've used conky to remind me what I've got mounted and what processes I'm running as well as giving my access to the console and xsession errors log.

[Freston]

Wow, that's very ... ehm ... geeky

No, I think it's great!