I and Manoj are thinking of designing a custom panel like Unity equivalent for LXDE

[Pranav Salunke]

We had a small discussion and are thinking of creating panel which will use GTK+ and LXDE api. We are trying to get a small working prototype by Sunday, which could determine the further development and realization of this idea. Just to make sure if anyone has some insight into this which could save us some trouble and unnecessary work or if someone is already on this .. to avoid duplication. 

[Srikant]

Nice idea, just check this link http://urukrama.wordpress.com/openbox-guide/, look in panel section, you will find different types of panels available, instead of creating a new one I would suggest you to build on one of these, also our main focus is stability, we can live with lxpanel instead without having mint menu if stability is not met...

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 11:35 PM, Pranav Salunke <pps.p...@gmail.com> wrote:

We had a small discussion and are thinking of creating panel which will use GTK+ and LXDE api. We are trying to get a small working prototype by Sunday, which could determine the further development and realization of this idea. Just to make sure if anyone has some insight into this which could save us some trouble and unnecessary work or if someone is already on this .. to avoid duplication. 

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[Pranav Salunke]

what about lubunu for netbook option??

[Pranav Salunke]

thanks for the link though it is going to be very helpful.

On Saturday, 17 November 2012 00:05:34 UTC+5:30, Srikant wrote:

[Srikant]

that uses bit more RAM, and text below icons are not aligned, that project is not updated since more than a year and it was the only release based on asus eepc i guess, more over we can go with that if we can add one more tab as desktop, which will let user to switch to default desktop wallpaper view..it uses two panels, so we should reduce it to one..we don't have space

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[Pranav Salunke]

yes i saw the text not in sync with the icons ... but thought its a vm bug ... ill confirm about the tabs and i need some tips on how to monitor the memory ? using the system monitor or some command or specific tool ?

[Srikant]

try
free -m -s 1, the actual memory is in second line(-/+ buffers/cache:        701       1204)

and more over why I'm getting mails from you, i should get from group with only reply option to group...let me check settings..

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[Pranav Salunke]

no idea why i did as you asked ... post on google groups instead of emails ...

[Srikant Patnaik]

Ok, I made the changes in group, let's see.

[Srikant]

You please reply from gmail, not from group, may be that causing the problem

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[Manoj Gudi]

I tried the inbuilt lxpanel editor, its very well developed.
I could come up with this(see screen shot); its rough on looks but its perfectly functional.

I m sure srikant must have tried this, I would like to know what shortcomings this panel has so that instead of building our own panel, we could edit this.

[Srikant]

The panel is written in C, when you say edit you means customizing the source or changing the settings ?
Although lxpanel is meant for lxde, it has one major issue what i noticed is the panel items may
not appear in same place after reboot...

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[Manoj Gudi]

yes using, I was referring to this http://wiki.lxde.org/en/How_to_write_plugins_for_LXPanel

I have rebooted my vm couple of times, i dint get any issue/panel-item problems so far...

[Srikant]

ok..nice..so you are writing a plugin for mint menu ?

[Manoj Gudi]

1> some icons and stuff need to be changed... that is graphical stuff which can be done later

2> yes idea is to make a plugin for mint menu, i have doubts regarding how lxde will play with gtk3 mint menu...
I will try for some hacks, if nothing works, I plan to write this plugin myself

[Srikant]

mintmenu will work with gtk2 also, see mate and older version of mint, mint menu is actually built
on slab menu developed by suse, just check..icons is not a problem we have a nice set of these icons http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Faenza?content=128143

[Pranav Salunke]

This is what we have come up with using PYQT and it takes around 11-14 mb memory rite now .... need some feedback , advice and code if possible ... so that we know wether to proceed down this lane .....

[Srikant]

14mb is RAM is bit heavy considering the nature of task, the overhead is due to pyqt, does it flush memory completely when closed ?
I think there are many such utilities already available, it would be good if you can make something
which can be integrated in menu or panel (think of alt + F2, a simple dialog which loads suggestions too)..the reason i was looking for slab is, it has nice category wise navigation with bookmarks for favorite location(home,documents etc) more over it has search bar too..I understand
the difficulty involved in porting slab to lxpanel..file search is trivial application, so I would not encourage you to spend much time on it..let's keep this app in hold for some time..let's come up
with more native solution..what you say ?

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 8:26 PM, Pranav Salunke <pps.p...@gmail.com> wrote:

This is what we have come up with using PYQT and it takes around 11-14 mb memory rite now .... need some feedback , advice and code if possible ... so that we know wether to proceed down this lane .....

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[Manoj Gudi]

1> Flushes all memory after it closed down
2> We already integrated with LXpanel; its very simple, make a new menu entry in /usr/lxpanel/config/panel file and linking it with .desktop (/usr/share/applications/) files which contain all metadata about applications, like link to their icon files(/usr/share/icons)
 and in which category they are placed in like Utilities/Office/Internet etc...
We planned to query that data and display in that app
3> Tell us more about other native solutions, where can we find out more about that.

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[Srikant]

This is good, the native soln would be using gtk2 libraries in C, that way you don't need any pyqt overhead, but its ok if it flushes memory, we can live with pyqt..other things are good..what I was
thinking is rather than having a separate window for this it should be open from panel itself, something like lxlauncher..we can replace the menu with your app..what you say? Just look at lxlauncher..

[Manoj Gudi]

Interesting idea...
Lemme see what I can do...
What does pranav has to say ?

[Pranav Salunke]

how much memory does the existing panel take ?? and also to make it in GTK+ will mean high amount of time invested in making it and also the possibility of bugs, memory leaks , unwanted crashes. As we dont have any experience in C programming just some basic knowledge. Also the limitation of time comes into the picture. If the PYQT app is not upto the mark and there are no other alternatives GTK+ for Py can be considered, otherwise it becomes very difficult project for me at-least.

On Friday, November 16, 2012 11:35:35 PM UTC+5:30, Pranav Salunke wrote:

[Srikant]

I already agreed to pyqt, please comment on lxlauncher related query

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[Pranav Salunke]

yes we can replace the launcher with our app since it will be searching and displaying applications, we will need to do some more study on lxlauncher and add some more use-cases to our app, and how to go about it.

On Friday, November 16, 2012 11:35:35 PM UTC+5:30, Pranav Salunke wrote:

[Srikant]

Please also make it eye candy and touch friendly, with nice colors in bg & fg, don't be hurry, you can do it after your exams also, we can live with normal menu, also use python-gtk2 instead of pyqt, that would reduce the overhead to some extent

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