coffeedrinker | # 31 | 2008-06-18, 21:20 | Report

The reason I believe it is a dbus issue is that if I use fvwm instead of matchbox (and that being the only difference) I cannot launch microb OR OTHER APPS that rely on dbus to get started (based on their error messages. Now this was NOT a problem in OS2007. Other apps would launch but not microb but now many more apps are relying on dbus and failing because of it.

So once we find out what is going on in the start of matchbox as it relates to dbus we should have our answer to getting all the standards apps running under any window manager of our choosing (not just KDE (and I know KDE is not merely a wm)).

penguinbait | # 32 | 2008-06-18, 22:05 | Report

Thats what I said, and why I posted the bounty of 40$ of my own money.

Still at 60$ via paypal, any other contributers?????

qole | # 33 | 2008-06-18, 22:25 | Report

So, I have good news and I have bad news.

The good news is that I have figured out what extra "thing" needed to be running in order for the browser to work. The bad news is that the necessary "thing" is matchbox-window-manager.

I put this to the test with a torturous, rube-goldberg method, and I actually got the browser working in KDE... sort-of.



As you can see, (as root) I started a Xephyr nested x-server first, creating a new display :1 ...
(I was able to get Xephyr working in Maemo by copying /usr/bin/Xephyr and the two /usr/lib files from the libpixman package, and then copying the /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc directory from my Debian chroot)

Then, as "user", in a (non-root) terminal window, I did:
This got me the screenshot you see above (I fixed that ugly X cursor with the "-host-cursor" parameter in Xephyr). I also uploaded the screenshot to Flickr with the MicroB browser, so it does work.

I have tried running /usr/lib/sapwood-server to get the browser's toolbar icons to show, but it simply changes the errors from errors about sapwood-server not running to errors about not being able to get the window id and not being able to get the icon info. However, running sapwood-server gets the menus (bookmarks, dropdown, etc) looking a lot better. I'm sure you just need to tweak something to get it to show the icons.

If you change the matchbox-window-manager line to "-use_titlebar yes" then you get a big Hildon bar across the screen, but you also get your pull-down menu.

Ok, that's as much as I'm going to do today. Anyone else interested can run with this for a bit.

PROBLEMS WITH THIS METHOD:

• Can't resize the window (perhaps just make it fullscreen?)
• Toolbar icons are broken
• Dropdown menu doesn't show OR you've got a honking big titlebar

I'm not sure that it is significantly slower, however, so I'm not including that as a "problem"

I'm sure you will find more problems

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Last edited by qole; 2008-06-18 at 22:30.

qole | # 34 | 2008-06-18, 23:05 | Report

Ok, so you need to add sapwood-server to your commands. It makes things much prettier. You need sapwood to draw widgets like scroll bars and file menus.

Assuming you have installed Xephyr in maemo (as detailed above), and you can use sudo to run commands as root:

This will get you something that looks like this:



... the YouTube video ran pretty well, actually, I'm not sure if it is noticeably slower than in OS2008 ...

And to make it all go away, just close the Xephyr window or "sudo killall Xephyr"

penguinbait | # 35 | 2008-06-19, 00:18 | Report

Not really what I was looking for, but awesome none the less. I have been wanting to play with Xepher on here for a while, but I have not had the time.

Can you PLEASE, post a tarball of the fonts??

EDIT
nevermind, anyone else wants em, http://penguinbait.com/fonts.tgz

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Last edited by penguinbait; 2008-06-19 at 01:09.

penguinbait | # 36 | 2008-06-19, 01:31 | Report

OMG, can someone hildonize Xephry so it could run full screen on maemo. Then you could just run KDE in a window. This would work pretty good, even if memory is a tad low Sure would be nice for icewm or other minimal wm, window maker xfce

coffeedrinker | # 37 | 2008-06-19, 01:49 | Report

But what I don't understand is why they decided to make dbus apps dependent on the wm. Any rational to that? Knowing that might help sort it out. My knowledge of dbus isn't much other than knowing what it does.

I've spent lots of time on this before and never sorted it out (I already knew it needed matchbox). Perhaps I can give it another run soon.

penguinbait | # 38 | 2008-06-19, 01:55 | Report

My icons worked fine, it might have been your environment from which you started it. Also I did not start sapwood server




EDIT, IF YOU USE TITLEBAR yes, you can use the fullscreen button and make the buttons go away.

My icons are working and after starting sap server , I only get the errors for window ID

Using it in KDE with no window decorations, so its full screen, all menus and zoom are working.

Man I really hope we can get it to work without hildon, but this does actually work and is useable. I did have some network haning it appears, I need to do some more playing.

qole --- Nice Job

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Last edited by penguinbait; 2008-06-19 at 02:30.

qole | # 39 | 2008-06-19, 02:41 | Report

I figured out that it only takes 4 files for fonts, and they can be put in your normal fonts dir. I'll try to make a .deb, it will be my first one ever

qole | # 40 | 2008-06-19, 03:35 | Report

Ok, here is my very first .deb ever. kbrowser-0.1-1_armel.deb kbrowser-0.1-2_armel.deb kbrowser-0.1-3_armel.deb
kbrowser-0.2-2_armel.deb

It is over a megabyte, so I had to upload it to rapidshare. Most of the size is the Xephyr server.

Install the .deb and then run kbrowser as "user" (not root) from a non-Hildon WM.

The only thing I can't do (and I wish I could do it) is, as part of the install process, add the line to sudoers so that "sudo <command>" works. I think if you have KDE installed, that is already in place.

You can mess with the startup script, it is /usr/bin/kbrowser and it is just a shell script with the commands from my previous post (with a fix for needing the whole fonts directory, and the addition of wmctrl to change the window name to "MicroB Browser").

EDIT: I fixed a small bug; the window wasn't getting renamed properly. New file posted.

EDIT2: Please play around with the window dimensions in the Xephyr command line. I chose 700x450 because I have my KDE panel / bar /whatever on the side and that window size fits nicely on my screen without hiding any important stuff.

EDIT3: added KDE icon to Internet menu!

Report any problems to me!

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Last edited by qole; 2009-09-29 at 23:18. Reason: updated link