My take / suggestions on linux lite

[mdavies5]

Congratulations on Lite 2.8. It just happens to include most of the apps I like; I didn't have to uninstall anything. Mostly everything worked fine up to and including the install. EG WiFi, Bluetooth, NVidia driver, extra languages etc. There are a few oddities I would like to point out, they may be design choices however:
1. Virtual Box is set up to load at startup which generates an error message. Solved by removing it from startup apps.
2. The keyboard icon in the panel is an iBus applet and has no effect when an extra keyboard layout is installed. Fixed by deleting the iBus applet and adding the Keyboard applet.
3. First bootup showed Lite Feather splash screen. 2nd Bootup showed Ubuntu 14.04 splash and subsequent bootups showed Lite 2.8 Splash Not important
4. Changing to automatic login generated a message "Automatic login has not been applied" Not mportant
5. Printer setup locks up every time I try to install my Epson XP310. Printer found ok, driver found but then locks up during printer install. Killing the process causes locks to be retained on some pkg files which causes all sorts of other problems. Solved by rebooting to clear locks then installing Epson Driver from Synaptic then running Printer setup again.
6. The big problem for me is that Thunar will not run bash script files. I read the help file which explains that this is a security feature but one file did run. This file did not need a terminal. The others did need a terminal to display messages or get input.

These are not criticisms just helpful info, I hope Most distros I test have far more little issues.

[avj]

If you right click on the menu button and select properties, you can edit the recently used menu usage, by clicking on the behavior tab, if you set the number of items in recently used to zero the menu item no longer shows.

[chke419]

One other very pesky thing I dislike in LL is the danged "Recently used" menu folder. To me this is just another thing people have to keep going in and cleaning regularly. Why in the world this was added is well beyond my comprehension. Especially now knowing it can neither be removed or disabled.

[chke419]

Now that I have the destop good enough for the time being, now I need to get started on other modifications to LL. I am more surprised then ever after having read through allot of the posts here at the forum that Linux Lite doesn't still offer a stripped down version plus the regular version. There's allot of requests for a stripped down version scattered across the forum. Here I thought it was just me. I will say that this distro has impressed me from allot of others, the menu and the xfce environment and the choice of system default programs works nicely especially with as stable as it is. I keep pulling crap out and it keeps kicking along.

The only way they can improve this distro is just to offer a stripped down version plus work on the default bar visually by default in my opinion. I believe I will be sticking around with this particular distro as it's just a clean, user friendly desktop. Only way I think I would change is if someone else built one as described earlier with the same DE. Plus I have to admit that this forum is very user friendly.

[Wirezfree]

@LL-user,

Many Thanks... unfortunately I have tried that.
MS-Visio is very clever drawing tool, I use it for mainly for flow & process(swim lane) diagrams
I can knock-up diagrams very quickly with drag & drop, connect shapes with lines that just snap into place.

I have used it since mid 90's when it was Shapeware, it was acquired in 2000 by MS
If you ignore the nasty ribbon bar MS added, it is still very capable.

Colleagues used to use it for connecting to database's to reverse engineer them, draw the schemas.

[LL-user]

"trust me when I say there are some softwares out there I wish they would make for linux such as East - tec eraser,  CCleaner and O&O Defrag.

[...]

For me, It is stable, it's lite on resource, no bloat or eye candy, and it covers 99% of what I need
If I could get a MS Visio replacement, it would be 100%, nearest I have found is DIA

Hi Wirezfree,

First of all, I do not have much experience with MS Visio at all. So the following might be useless as I only can quote the information without verifying it.

Have you come across/ tested yED (Graph Editor)?

https://www.yworks.com/products/yed

yEd is a powerful desktop application that can be used to quickly and effectively generate high-quality diagrams.
Create diagrams manually, or import your external data for analysis. Our automatic layout algorithms arrange even large data sets with just the press of a button.

yEd is freely available and runs on all major platforms: Windows, Unix/Linux, and Mac OS X.

http://www.nextstep4it.com/ubuntu-linux-yed-graph-editor/

yEd(Graph Editor) is an open source and powerful desktop application written in Java programming language. yED is generally used to  generate high-quality diagrams. It is an alternate or replacement of Microsoft office Visio on Ubuntu Linux.
  Key Features :
 

• Import your own data from an Excel / spreadsheet (.xls) or XML
• Create diagrams with ease via an intuitive user interface.
• Automatically arrange your diagram elements.
• Export bitmap and vector graphics as PNG, JPG, SVG, PDF, SWF

Hope that helps

[avj]

Thanks

It is one of the most complete icon sets I have found.

[torreydale]

I like this set of icons, avj.  Except for the Create System Report utility, it seems very complete.  Easy to install, too.

[avj]

No problem, I am just glad I could help.

[chke419]

avj

That is just what I needed, thanks so much. Those icons are so much easier to see then the LL default. I can even shrink the bar back down to size again and see what they are. Color does make a big difference. And even the desktop icons that I wasn't really worried about now have color. Again I can't thank you enough! There went that drabby gray on gray!

God bless you man

[avj]

The suggested icon theme contains many different themes and very colorful icons throughout tray icons included.  I am including a screenshot with the icons used with the default LL desktop theme you can click on the image to get a better view.



Not sure on the desktop clock feature but some other forum member is likely to know.

[chke419]

Another question I have is where do I find the program for the clock, date and system information to show on the desktop like it does in those pictures? That would sure make those items easily readable.

[chke419]

You may want to try a different icon theme such as the one at the following link.

http://xfce-look.org/content/show.php/smoothX-Xfce?content=163261

I looked at this from the link you provided and it only showed the desktop icons so I guess my question is does or will this also change the system tray icons where the time,sound,network connection and battery reside? This is more of what I am searching for is for the tray icons but am willing to change them all up if necessary.

Thanks so much for your efforts in advance. 

[avj]

You may want to try a different icon theme such as the one at the following link.

http://xfce-look.org/content/show.php/smoothX-Xfce?content=163261

The page has instructions for adding it so that it gets updates.

In a terminal enter the following lines of code one line at a time hitting enter after each line. After you finish you will be able to change the icon theme from Menu>Settings>Appearance.

Code: [Select]

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sasha-1594/smoothx

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install smoothx-xfce

[chke419]

This may have been brought up initially but here's a link to the manual for customizing LL (Themes/Icon sets etc.)
https://www.linuxliteos.com/manual/customize.html

Thanks for your response and yes I did see mention of this earlier and I even looked briefly at several web sites that have the themes but the problem I noticed was there were allot of them that didn't work or I didn't install them correctly which is very possible but I did follow the manual. I just wished someone had one they had already installed by the manual that added what I search for. I changed the color of the bar from gray but the system tray icons enlarged some still do no justice for the visually impaired.  There needs to be color in the icons to better distinguish it from the tray itself.