For a maximal dogfood experience, I was looking around for a way to use a replacement Windows shell with Wine as my desktop environment instead of gnome or kde. So far, all the ones I've found are either broken, hard to use, or just plain weird. I've been working through the list at http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Microsoft_Windows/S... http://www.astonshell.com/aston/ - couldn't figure out how to run it? http://www.emergedesktop.org/ - kind of works, but very minimal, no start menu http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~mosses/rob/liteshell.html - works, but very minimal, no start menu http://purels.org - no help, just exits, saying "ha ha, you didn't configure me". Obviously not meant for me :-) http://www.lighttek.com/talisman.htm - pretty, but no Programs menu?! (Maybe that's there but broken, wine bug?) http://www.sky.franken.de/explorer/download.html - ROS explorer - prebuilt binary there is 3 years out of date, doesn't work too well Anyone have a favorite I should try? - Dan
Quoting Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com>: Wine + XPde (http://xpde.com) is probably the most Windows-resemblant environment I can think of. Sadly, XPde seems to be stalled.
For a maximal dogfood experience, I was looking around for a way to use a replacement Windows shell with Wine as my desktop environment instead of gnome or kde.
So far, all the ones I've found are either broken, hard to use, or just plain weird.
I've been working through the list at http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Microsoft_Windows/S...
http://www.astonshell.com/aston/ - couldn't figure out how to run it?
http://www.emergedesktop.org/ - kind of works, but very minimal, no start menu
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~mosses/rob/liteshell.html - works, but very minimal, no start menu
http://purels.org - no help, just exits, saying "ha ha, you didn't configure me". Obviously not meant for me :-)
http://www.lighttek.com/talisman.htm - pretty, but no Programs menu?! (Maybe that's there but broken, wine bug?)
http://www.sky.franken.de/explorer/download.html - ROS explorer - prebuilt binary there is 3 years out of date, doesn't work too well
Anyone have a favorite I should try? - Dan
-- Pau Garcia i Quiles http://www.elpauer.org (Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 5:16 PM, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
For a maximal dogfood experience, I was looking around for a way to use a replacement Windows shell with Wine as my desktop environment instead of gnome or kde.
So far, all the ones I've found are either broken, hard to use, or just plain weird.
I've been working through the list at http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Microsoft_Windows/S...
http://www.astonshell.com/aston/ - couldn't figure out how to run it?
http://www.emergedesktop.org/ - kind of works, but very minimal, no start menu
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~mosses/rob/liteshell.html - works, but very minimal, no start menu
http://purels.org - no help, just exits, saying "ha ha, you didn't configure me". Obviously not meant for me :-)
http://www.lighttek.com/talisman.htm - pretty, but no Programs menu?! (Maybe that's there but broken, wine bug?)
http://www.sky.franken.de/explorer/download.html - ROS explorer - prebuilt binary there is 3 years out of date, doesn't work too well
Anyone have a favorite I should try? - Dan
Could try Ulteo's Virtual desktop, to virtualize Linux inside Wine :-P http://www.ulteo.com/home/en/virtualdesktop?autolang=en
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 5:37 PM, Austin English <austinenglish(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 5:16 PM, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
For a maximal dogfood experience, I was looking around for a way to use a replacement Windows shell with Wine as my desktop environment instead of gnome or kde.
So far, all the ones I've found are either broken, hard to use, or just plain weird.
I've been working through the list at http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Microsoft_Windows/S...
http://www.astonshell.com/aston/ - couldn't figure out how to run it?
http://www.emergedesktop.org/ - kind of works, but very minimal, no start menu
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~mosses/rob/liteshell.html - works, but very minimal, no start menu
http://purels.org - no help, just exits, saying "ha ha, you didn't configure me". Obviously not meant for me :-)
http://www.lighttek.com/talisman.htm - pretty, but no Programs menu?! (Maybe that's there but broken, wine bug?)
http://www.sky.franken.de/explorer/download.html - ROS explorer - prebuilt binary there is 3 years out of date, doesn't work too well
Anyone have a favorite I should try? - Dan
I haven't tried these in awhile but they worked decently enough a couple years ago on xp/2000 Blackbox window manager for windows (dont worry desktop icon/system tray plugin is included by default) http://www.bb4win.org/news.php Litestep (highly customzieable, tons of plugins afterStep/NextStep clone) http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php --John
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 4:02 PM, John Klehm <xixsimplicityxix(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Blackbox window manager for windows (dont worry desktop icon/system tray plugin is included by default) http://www.bb4win.org/news.php
Development stopped a couple years ago, even the forks look dormant
Litestep (highly customzieable, tons of plugins afterStep/NextStep clone) http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php
LiteStep of any flavor just laughs at me, saying "Learn my language, write a config file, then maybe I'll talk to you". I did also just try SharpE, but it crashes and is just as inscrutable as any of the others. - Dan
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 4:02 PM, John Klehm <xixsimplicityxix(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Blackbox window manager for windows (dont worry desktop icon/system tray plugin is included by default) http://www.bb4win.org/news.php
Development stopped a couple years ago, even the forks look dormant
Litestep (highly customzieable, tons of plugins afterStep/NextStep clone) http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php
LiteStep of any flavor just laughs at me, saying "Learn my language, write a config file, then maybe I'll talk to you".
I did also just try SharpE, but it crashes and is just as inscrutable as any of the others. - Dan
I just tried the bb fork xoblite bb3 rc1 on server 2008 and it seems to work alright. The default menu generation looks a little off (duplicate entries) but you can just edit the text file it makes (listed right on the menu itself) other than that it seems to be equivalent to start->programs. No desktop icons by default though, Ill see if I can find a plugin that does that. --John
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 4:31 PM, John Klehm <xixsimplicityxix(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I just tried the bb fork xoblite bb3 rc1 on server 2008 and it seems to work alright.
OK, now try it on Wine. A recipe in the appdb would be nice. I just built ROS explorer from source, and ran its explorer.exe. It runs, and shows things like My Computer and desktop icons, and shows a context menu on background. Oddly, it doesn't show a Start menu. Perhaps this is a bug in wine, as the doc claims the start menu is there. Here's the recipe, in case anyone else wants to try, adapted from http://www.sky.franken.de/explorer/index.html#compile sudo apt-get install mingw32 sudo ln -s i586-mingw32msvc-windres /usr/bin/windres svn co svn://svn.reactos.org/reactos/trunk/reactos/base/shell/explorer cd explorer vi Makefile-MinGW change three lines: -CC = gcc -CXX = g++ -LINK = g++ +CC = i586-mingw32msvc-gcc +CXX = i586-mingw32msvc-g++ +LINK = i586-mingw32msvc-g++ make -f Makefile-MinGW This fails because windres can't find windows.h. I hacked around it like this: cd ~ mkdir w32api cd w32api wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/mingw/w32api-3.11.tar.gz tar -xzvf w32api-3.11.tar.gz cd ~/explorer windres -I ~/w32api/include/ -DWIN32 -D__WINDRES__ -DNDEBUG -DUNICODE -o explorer.coff explorer_intres.r make -f Makefile-MinGW And surprisingly, that built explorer.exe. The menus are messed up (they contain garbage text), and as I said earlier, there's no start menu. - Dan
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 8:59 PM, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
The menus are messed up (they contain garbage text), and as I said earlier, there's no start menu.
You should look at explorer-new. Its in the ReactOS source tree and being developed by Thomas Weidenmuller as a real Windows compatible shell replacement. Unfortunately it does not work on Windows or ReactOS at this time. The old ReactOS explorer will be removed when explorer-new is ready. -- Steven Edwards "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 8:09 PM, Steven Edwards <winehacker(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 8:59 PM, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
The menus are messed up (they contain garbage text), and as I said earlier, there's no start menu.
You should look at explorer-new. Its in the ReactOS source tree and being developed by Thomas Weidenmuller as a real Windows compatible shell replacement. Unfortunately it does not work on Windows or ReactOS at this time. The old ReactOS explorer will be removed when explorer-new is ready.
-- Steven Edwards
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
Just thought since I probably will be gone all weekend I'd report before next week. I'll try and write up something more useful after this but here's my dogfood process so far: wget "http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-2.0.0.14&os=win&lang=en-US" wget "http://www.xoblite.net/files/xoblite_bb3_rc1.zip" mkdir xoblite && cd xoblite && unzip xoblite_bb3_rc1.zip ubuntu logout and change session to failsafe terminal bring up wifi $wine ~/xoblite/Blackbox.exe $wine ~/Firefox\ Setup\ 2.0.0.14.exe The main problem seems to be lack of windowing and keyboard input, nothing has a title bar.I wonder if that is because bb4win seems to call RegisterShellHook which is a stub in wine? On the upside I was able to launch firefox from bb4win and browse to some sites fairly easily. =P
"Dan Kegel" <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
For a maximal dogfood experience, I was looking around for a way to use a replacement Windows shell with Wine as my desktop environment instead of gnome or kde.
Built-in Wine explorer does a lot of things which the replacements won't do, like desktop window management and HAL support. -- Dmitry.
On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 8:44 PM, Dmitry Timoshkov <dmitry(a)codeweavers.com> wrote:
For a maximal dogfood experience, I was looking around for a way to use a replacement Windows shell with Wine as my desktop environment instead of gnome or kde.
Built-in Wine explorer does a lot of things which the replacements won't do, like desktop window management and HAL support.
I think we're going to want to add a start button and taskbar to our builtin explorer. None of the replacements seem to look anything like Windows XP, which is kind of what I'm after. - Dan
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 12:12 AM, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
I think we're going to want to add a start button and taskbar to our builtin explorer. None of the replacements seem to look anything like Windows XP, which is kind of what I'm after.
Again, I think you should look at explorer-new. Its pretty close to working, I think the StartMenu and friends work. It is designed for Windows XP, does the Desktop, Start Menu, Taskbar, etc, is written in C, is LGPL and is written by a ReactOS developer that has not been blacklisted by Wine. I don't think it would be much trouble to merge the two. Except of course shell32 is where most of the explorer really lives and there is a lot of functionality missing in wine. Due to the ReactOS embargo, shell32 has started to fork quite a bit on the ReactOS side. http://svn.reactos.org/svn/reactos/trunk/reactos/base/shell/explorer-new/ -- Steven Edwards "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
"Steven Edwards" <winehacker(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Again, I think you should look at explorer-new. Its pretty close to working, I think the StartMenu and friends work. It is designed for Windows XP, does the Desktop, Start Menu, Taskbar, etc, is written in C, is LGPL and is written by a ReactOS developer that has not been blacklisted by Wine. I don't think it would be much trouble to merge the two. Except of course shell32 is where most of the explorer really lives and there is a lot of functionality missing in wine. Due to the ReactOS embargo, shell32 has started to fork quite a bit on the ReactOS side.
http://svn.reactos.org/svn/reactos/trunk/reactos/base/shell/explorer-new/
Since ros explorer uses an undocumented shell32.LogoffWindowsDialog as reported in http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10006 it should be enough to blacklist its developer. -- Dmitry.
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 12:37 AM, Dmitry Timoshkov <dmitry(a)codeweavers.com> wrote:
Since ros explorer uses an undocumented shell32.LogoffWindowsDialog as reported in http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10006 it should be enough to blacklist its developer.
"ROS explorer doesn't count as a real world application that uses undocumented Windows APIs. Besides the question remains where ROS explorer developers has acquired a not published information." Yes because we all know that developer had to work very hard to reverse engineer that function with its many arguments and obfuscated naming. -- Steven Edwards "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
Hello, what about asking the developer where he got his information? ;-) If I remember correctly, I found this logoff dialog function using Google on one of those "undocumented Windows 95" web pages when adding it to the original ROS Explorer. Regards, Martin Am 23.05.2008 um 06:37 schrieb Dmitry Timoshkov:
"Steven Edwards" <winehacker(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Again, I think you should look at explorer-new. Its pretty close to working, I think the StartMenu and friends work. It is designed for Windows XP, does the Desktop, Start Menu, Taskbar, etc, is written in C, is LGPL and is written by a ReactOS developer that has not been blacklisted by Wine. I don't think it would be much trouble to merge the two. Except of course shell32 is where most of the explorer really lives and there is a lot of functionality missing in wine. Due to the ReactOS embargo, shell32 has started to fork quite a bit on the ReactOS side.
http://svn.reactos.org/svn/reactos/trunk/reactos/base/shell/explorer-new/
Since ros explorer uses an undocumented shell32.LogoffWindowsDialog as reported in http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10006 it should be enough to blacklist its developer.
-- Dmitry.
Dmitry Timoshkov [mailto:dmitry(a)codeweavers.com] wrote:
Since ros explorer uses an undocumented shell32.LogoffWindowsDialog as reported in http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10006 it should be enough to blacklist its developer.
If you google for LogoffWindowsDialog you find entries for a Wine hard stub and then two patches to ROS, one implementing a soft stub in ROS and the other adding a call to ExitProcess to this stub so the shutdown process can continue. Is this reverse engineering? Rolf Kalbermatter
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 6:12 AM, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
I think we're going to want to add a start button and taskbar to our builtin explorer. None of the replacements seem to look anything like Windows XP, which is kind of what I'm after. - Dan
This sounds a lot like my idea: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11629 I first posted it on this list, and the consensus here was that Wine should not have a "usable interface" as I called it, because the right direction would be to strive for maximum integration. Then I was told I should have instead posted it on BugZilla, which resulted in the bug above. Remco
Dmitry Timoshkov skrev:
"Dan Kegel" <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
For a maximal dogfood experience, I was looking around for a way to use a replacement Windows shell with Wine as my desktop environment instead of gnome or kde.
Built-in Wine explorer does a lot of things which the replacements won't do, like desktop window management and HAL support.
Last time I checked, the HAL stuff was handled by mountmgr.sys
Quoting Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com>: Not exactly wine but quite close: some people are trying to use KDE4 as the desktop for ReactOS: http://kde-reactos.sourceforge.net/ ... which mutates KDE into the "operating system", able to run with a Linux, BSD, Win32, Solaris, etc kernel.Crazy.
For a maximal dogfood experience, I was looking around for a way to use a replacement Windows shell with Wine as my desktop environment instead of gnome or kde.
So far, all the ones I've found are either broken, hard to use, or just plain weird.
I've been working through the list at http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Microsoft_Windows/S...
http://www.astonshell.com/aston/ - couldn't figure out how to run it?
http://www.emergedesktop.org/ - kind of works, but very minimal, no start menu
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~mosses/rob/liteshell.html - works, but very minimal, no start menu
http://purels.org - no help, just exits, saying "ha ha, you didn't configure me". Obviously not meant for me :-)
http://www.lighttek.com/talisman.htm - pretty, but no Programs menu?! (Maybe that's there but broken, wine bug?)
http://www.sky.franken.de/explorer/download.html - ROS explorer - prebuilt binary there is 3 years out of date, doesn't work too well
Anyone have a favorite I should try? - Dan
-- Pau Garcia i Quiles http://www.elpauer.org (Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)
On Do, 2008-05-22 at 15:16 -0700, Dan Kegel wrote:
For a maximal dogfood experience, I was looking around for a way to use a replacement Windows shell with Wine as my desktop environment instead of gnome or kde.
Wow.
So far, all the ones I've found are either broken, hard to use, or just plain weird.
Anyone have a favorite I should try?
http://www.calmira.net Examples: http://www.calmira.net/screenshots/stephan.htm http://www.calmira.net/screenshots/chris_p.htm http://www.calmira.net/screenshots/pcfreak2.htm Related work: Calmira_XP: http://www.abzone.be/calmira_calxp Calmira_Longhorn: http://calmira.co.nr/ Example: http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=aVBPR4r ######### Test Calmira_Longhorn: cd <wine_c_drive> wget http://calmira.kyblsoft.sk/dwnlds/callh36.zip unzip callh36.zip cd CALMIRA To avoid, that the explorer.exe from calmira is used for the desktop, you need the full path to explorer.exe.so wine <your_build_path>/programs/explorer/explorer.exe.so /desktop=xxx,800x600 CALMIRA.EXE Sometimes, http://www.calmira.org is referenced, but that is outdated and give you an advertising website -- By by ... Detlef
participants (11)
-
Austin English -
Dan Kegel -
Detlef Riekenberg -
Dmitry Timoshkov -
John Klehm -
Martin Fuchs -
Ove Kaaven -
Pau Garcia i Quiles -
Remco -
Rolf Kalbermatter -
Steven Edwards