hi, everybody!
i'm still in the always-exciting configuration stage of linux on the little gemini. and i have not found a satisfactory mail client. there used to be a world of them and there really aren't anymore.
i've installed, configured, and in minutes grown to hate thunderbird. likewise the latest kmail. that leaves nothing. i thought that the current kmail might be good because it turns out that kwin is nothing but plasma desktop (in fact, i can at login choose plasma. ick) so it seemed as if many of the underpinnings would already be there; still, it was a 6-gb download and displays all the things that made me not like post-3x kde.
so a couple of questions: how much stuff would i have to install to get kmail-trinity to work here? and would it get along okay with the kwin/plasma/qt5 stuff already installed?
dep
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On 05/10/2018 11:56 AM, dep wrote:
hi, everybody!
i'm still in the always-exciting configuration stage of linux on the little gemini. and i have not found a satisfactory mail client. there used to be a world of them and there really aren't anymore.
"claws-mail". Fast, lightweight and user-friendly GTK+2 based email client.
https://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=sourcenames&keywords=claws-m...
Cheers,
On May 10, 2018 7:09 PM, Jimmy Johnson field.engineer@gmail.com wrote:
"claws-mail". Fast, lightweight and user-friendly GTK+2 based email client.
https://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=sourcenames&keywords=claws-m...
thanks. when we get the vid driver acceleration going as it should, that will be a possibility (though gtk2 stuff shows up very tiny -- the screen is 2160x1080 and only 6-inches diagonally -- because apparently gtk2 doesn't listen to what the desktop configuration has to say about the matter. but i'll give it a shot.
a more urgent issue is the little 128gb microSD i buried deep inside the gadget today in hope of making it /home. i went to edit /etc/fstab to add it and guess what? there *isn't any* /etc/fstab! this is a frigging systemd system! nor do any of the drive configurators we know and love work with systemd, apparently.
this has made me very cross.
dep
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dep composed on 2018-05-10 19:35 (UTC-0400):
thanks. when we get the vid driver acceleration going as it should, that will be a possibility (though gtk2 stuff shows up very tiny -- the screen is 2160x1080 and only 6-inches diagonally -- because apparently gtk2 doesn't listen to what the desktop configuration has to say about the matter. but i'll give it a shot.
Is 'xrdb -query | grep dpi' reporting Xft.dpi 96? If yes, that's probably what GTK is responding to. I don't remember Xft.dpi being a common problem with GTK2 apps, but with GTK3 apps outside of Gnome or its relatives it certainly can be.
Xft.dpi is how TDE desktop settings forces DPI, but with limited choices. Put Xft.dpi in e.g. ~/.Xresources and it isn't limited.
OTOH, 2160x1080 on a 6" diagonal might be escaping a sanity check somewhere.
On May 10, 2018 9:33 PM, Felix Miata mrmazda@earthlink.net wrote:
Is 'xrdb -query | grep dpi' reporting Xft.dpi 96? If yes, that's probably what
GTK is responding to. I don't remember Xft.dpi being a common problem with GTK2
apps, but with GTK3 apps outside of Gnome or its relatives it certainly can be.
It is indeed 96 dpi. In LXQT and KDE (!) on the device I've been able to mitigate it some through font size, but the random GTK application has no special place to fix it, mostly. I went ahead and d/led claws and installed it, and I like it -- it's the closest I've found to KMail. I was able to adjust some of the fonts, but even so there are some places where the gadget could really benefit from a pointing device. Scrollbars, for instance, are just about impossible -- they're really narrow and with the currently slow video drivers it makes for a kind of crapshoot, because often by the time you realize you got it this time you've overshot the place you were scrolling to. Likewise tiny little buttons -- you might hit the one you want or you might hit the one that does the opposite of what you want. Keyboard-only navigation is important! Because the gadget has two USB-C ports, I'll plug the little hub into the appropriate one tomorrow and plug a mouse into it and get to the configuration options that have otherwise escaped me. Oh, and you sometimes but not always can scroll a page by dragging it up -- sometimes it just selects contents.
LXQT wouldn't be all that awful if it weren't so authoritarian. You'd think you could change the desktop wallpaper, and you would be wrong. You can change themes, but the developers discourage writing them. There is *one* icon size -- I could use some much bigger ones. And so on. There is work to be done.
A real concern for a time was screens that hang over the edge, so that you couldn't poke at "OK" or "Cancel," but one of the developers wrote a hack that lets you move the window with Alt+finger drag. Until then, people were installing LXQT on their desktop machines and counting how many tabs it was to "OK." This was particularly an issue in the Connman wifi configurator (that I guess will also be the Connman phone configurator, when all that is working).
Xft.dpi is how TDE desktop settings forces DPI, but with limited choices. Put
Xft.dpi in e.g. ~/.Xresources and it isn't limited.
The guys plugged in an x2 zoom such that it's effectively 1080x540. If it weren't for stuff like scrollbars, I'd rather do it by adjusting fontsize, because I do a lot of work in the GIMP, and the higher the resolution the happier I am for that.
OTOH, 2160x1080 on a 6" diagonal might be escaping a sanity check somewhere.
I'm of two minds about that. I have an iPad mini with a Retina display, and that's 2048x1536 and is mostly fine -- of course, its 8-inch display is a whole lot bigger. But that resolution works fairly well, I'm told, on the iPhone. The problem here, to me, is more the 2:1 (which for some reason people call 18:9 -- why not 486:243? Or throw caution to the wind and call it 2160x1080?) aspect ratio. You can run two applications side by side -- but it's then two applications that are both too small to see well. 3:2 or 4:3 would be better, imho, and then there would be room for a pointing device and a few more keys.
It's an adventure! And what's cool is that apt-get update apt-get upgrade every day brings something that makes it better. One enduring irritation is that not everything is compiled for arm64, so workarounds for missing but essential applications is a pain.
dep
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dep composed on 2018-05-10 22:20 (UTC-0400):
It is indeed 96 dpi. In LXQT and KDE (!) on the device I've been able to mitigate it some through font size, but the random GTK application has no special place to fix it...Scrollbars, for instance, are just about impossible ...
Xft.dpi is how TDE desktop settings forces DPI, but with limited choices. Put
Xft.dpi in e.g. ~/.Xresources and it isn't limited.
The guys plugged in an x2 zoom such that it's effectively 1080x540. If it
Plugged in where and how?
weren't for stuff like scrollbars, I'd rather do it by adjusting fontsize, because I do a lot of work in the GIMP, and the higher the resolution the happier I am for that.
Xft.dpi is the foundation on which Gnome/GTK built its zoom knob. You should try incorporating it instead of kludging around it. Set it in Xresources (or TDE desktop settings if it offers something close enough to what Xorg is or you want) to whatever DPI number xdpyinfo or tdecmshell xserver reports and work from there, keeping resolution at your display's native.
On May 10, 2018 10:51 PM, Felix Miata mrmazda@earthlink.net wrote:
dep composed on 2018-05-10 22:20 (UTC-0400):
The guys plugged in an x2 zoom such that it's effectively 1080x540. If it
Plugged in where and how?
Good question, and one for which I have no answer. I was on chat with some of the Linux-for-Gemini developers as I was setting up the machine, and I mentioned that changing the dpi from 4XX to 2XX might make my tired old eyes better able to see stuff on the screen. Whereupon it was said that as shipped it had a x2 zoom factor built in.
Xft.dpi is the foundation on which Gnome/GTK built its zoom knob. You should try
incorporating it instead of kludging around it. Set it in Xresources (or TDE
desktop settings if it offers something close enough to what Xorg is or you
want) to whatever DPI number xdpyinfo or tdecmshell xserver reports and work
from there, keeping resolution at your display's native.
I am most very interested in this, and have no experience with it. I changed DPI long ago (how long? Well, it was in xf86config) and I think maybe in a KDE setting once or twice. But I know nothing of a zoom knob or where I might experiment with it. Any advice/help with it would be appreciated.
dep
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dep composed on 2018-05-11 16:17 (UTC-0400):
Felix Miata wrote:
Xft.dpi is the foundation on which Gnome/GTK built its zoom knob. You should try
incorporating it instead of kludging around it. Set it in Xresources (or TDE
desktop settings if it offers something close enough to what Xorg is or you
want) to whatever DPI number xdpyinfo or tdecmshell xserver reports and work
from there, keeping resolution at your display's native.
I am most very interested in this, and have no experience with it. I changed DPI long ago (how long? Well, it was in xf86config) and I think maybe in a KDE setting once or twice. But I know nothing of a zoom knob or where I might experiment with it. Any advice/help with it would be appreciated.
I can't offer details on how Gnome or Mate or their kin present font sizing or DE zoom control to their users. I don't use any of those. All I know is that Xft.dpi is the mechanism's underpinning, and "zoom knob" is one alias (scaling being another), for their attempt to make it easier for users to escape from mousetype.
DPI OTOH I control on all my installations. DPI, whether via Xft.dpi (Xresources), DisplaySize (xorg.conf) or xrandr (both -fbmm and -dpi) do function as a desktop zooming knob that allows to keep the display's native mode in use while enlarging the various objects thereupon placed.
On Thu, 10 May 2018 22:20:00 -0400 dep dep@drippingwithirony.com wrote:
On May 10, 2018 9:33 PM, Felix Miata mrmazda@earthlink.net wrote:
Xft.dpi is how TDE desktop settings forces DPI, but with limited choices. Put
Xft.dpi in e.g. ~/.Xresources and it isn't limited.
The guys plugged in an x2 zoom such that it's effectively 1080x540. If it weren't for stuff like scrollbars, I'd rather do it by adjusting fontsize, because I do a lot of work in the GIMP, and the higher the resolution the happier I am for that.
If you're still struggling with this, you can override the font size (not the DPI or zoom factor) for GTK2 applications by editing .gtkrc-2.0 for the appropriate user. Mine has the line
gtk-font-name="Times New Roman, 12"
which does indeed produce text of the expected font and size.
Scrollbar width should be determined by the styles being applied. Unfortunately, it's been a long time since I last looked into GTK2 styles (I threw together something that satisfied me circa 2012 and have left it alone since). It's probably a setting applied to Gtk-Scrollbar:: or Gtk-Range::, though, and the style files are plain text and can be grepped for examples.
E. Liddell
On May 15, 2018 5:26 PM, E. Liddell ejlddll@googlemail.com wrote:
If you're still struggling with this, you can override the font size (not the DPI or
zoom factor) for GTK2 applications by editing .gtkrc-2.0 for the appropriate
user. Mine has the line
gtk-font-name="Times New Roman, 12"
which does indeed produce text of the expected font and size.
Thanks very much. I'll go poking around and see what I can find (and probably break!).
Things are zooming along in development of hacks to make a Linux desktop for the Gemini that is useful. I was here the other day wondering if anyone had any sense of how I could make an autohidden "panel" -- Kicker in LXQt -- reappear when I wanted it. By this morning, the Gemini hacker Adam Boardman had coded into the keymap the use of Ctrl-Esc to do just that. So all it took was apt-get update and apt-get upgrade, logging out and back in, and whammo, it works. (I do confess to having resurrected the little Kensington bluetooth pocket trackball that I got in the netbook days, for use when nothing else will do. But those occasions are becoming fewer and fewer.)
Scrollbar width should be determined by the styles being applied. Unfortunately,
it's been a long time since I last looked into GTK2 styles (I threw together something
that satisfied me circa 2012 and have left it alone since). It's probably a setting
applied to Gtk-Scrollbar:: or Gtk-Range::, though, and the style files are plain text
and can be grepped for examples.
If memory serves, there's a way to make desktop styles override application ones, at least in KDE/Trinity, and it's my hope to take an existing LZQt style and edit it like crazy to come up with one suited to the unique needs of the Gemini, and toss it out there for those who are interested. It would look ghastly on a full-size monitor. The only think I'm fairly sure of is that by the time I get it done the guys will have perfected tablet-like touch scrolling. (And of course the arrow keys are our friend.)
Thanks for the help -- it'll set me in the right direction on several fronts.
-
dep -
E. Liddell -
Felix Miata -
Jimmy Johnson