DISCONTINUED:Katana

[djohnston]

EDIT: This remaster has been discontinued. The iso is no longer available.

This one took a lot longer than I had anticipated. Why?

(1) Plymouth - The theme I created worked beautifully. I removed all the Ubuntu and Lubuntu themes. When I created the remaster, live boot complained about a missing shared library and refused to display the plymouth theme I had created. Yes, it still worked in the installation. But, not in the live session. I ended up with a cheat by leaving all plymouth themes installed and substituting Katana text and graphics for the Lubuntu ones. I'd need more knowledge of how plymouth works and what Lubuntu was complaining about to fix the problem. The error message occurs before the boot.log starts recording.

(2) Ubiquity - The remaster uses Ubuntu's ubiquity installer. For some odd reason, ubiquity requires a GTK3 theme installed in order to see anything in the installer window. By anything, I mean graphics, buttons, etc. Not only does a GTK3 theme need to be installed, it has to be the default theme for the desktop installation. Otherwise, the ubiquity window is basically a big black rectangle.

(3) Themes and icons - When installing the RazorQt desktop packages, the oxygen icon set is installed as a dependency. RazorQt defaults to using the oxygen theme. Not only is it NOT a GTK3 theme, it doesn't contain all the same components as the default Lubuntu icon theme. As a result of item (2) above, I had to revert to using the Lubuntu icon set for three desktop environments. That meant some work on the desktop files.

(4) Menus and desktop files - RazorQt's menus didn't match those of Lubuntu's, particularly the System and Preferences sections. Editing more desktop files brought both menus into sync. ClipIt, the clipboard manager, would not start in the RazorQt panel without the addition of a line to the desktop file in the ~/.config/autostart directory. Some desktop files had to be edited simply because their corresponding icons belonged to the oxygen icon set. In those cases, there were no icons showing next to the text in the menus.

NOTES:

(1) There were some packages left installed in the Lubuntu default installation that should have been removed. The previous kernel and header packages were still installed. The firefox-en package was installed, and Firefox isn't the browser they chose.

(2) To the casual observer, it may seem there are some unnecessary desktop files in the ~/.local/share/applications directory. Each and every one has a reason for being there. Watch what happens to the menus if they are moved or removed.

(3) I'm sure there are some configurations I've missed. For example, the Openbox desktop falls back to the Clearlooks theme because the Loma theme called for in rc.xml is not installed. The PCManFM file manager refuses to display in the RazorQt quicklaunch section of the panel. And RazorQt sometimes complains that the file manager has crashed when first starting the desktop. I'm sure it relates to the quicklaunch menu, as the file manager still works after an error message.

Your comments and suggestions are appreciated. There are probably better choices for media players than Audacious. I left it, for the time being, as that was the Lubuntu choice. If there is no interest shown in this particular project, I'm going to dump it. So far, it has been more trouble than it's worth. It was done as an exercise in getting RazorQt and LXDE to cooperate in the same installation, as well as having an up-to-date (current) installation of Gambas.

Base: Lubuntu 12.04 (LTS)
Kernel: 3.2.0-38-generic (non PAE)
Desktops: Openbox, LXDE, RazorQt

Applications:
Programming: Gambas 3.4, easily updatable to the next release from Synaptic.
Internet: Chromium web browser and Sylpheed email client. Most privacy options are already applied to Chromium and carried over to the installation.
Multimedia: Audacious and GNOME Mplayer.

Openbox desktop


LXDE desktop


RazorQt desktop


You can launch the ubiquity installer from the ISOLINUX boot menu by choosing that option. It will run as a window on a black screen. I don't know why. Is it supposed to be like that? I don't have a clue. The installer is still fully functional.





You can also launch the ubiquity installer from the desktop of the live CD session. All steps are the same, once the installer is launched.



You can download the files from the links below.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/31006290/Katana_RC1.iso
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/31006290/Katana_RC1.iso.md5

The iso is 621MB in size.

[melodie]

Hi,

Very fast : for Ubuntu Openbox I used the gtk3 theme shimmer from the XUbuntu project, and I had to add one of the provided themes in the file /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini (where I changed the default one to "greybird"). Or you can add the package light-themes which provides 2 gtk3 themes, to your choice... (Ambiance and Radiance : it is "Ambiance" which is configured in the settings.ini above said). And you will also need the ubiquity-slideshow-* : ie ubiquity-slideshow-lubuntu, and if you don't you will get a very tiny window while installing.

About the "plymouth theme" in the Live, it is not the plymouth theme which is used, but either a text mode theme (still having for name plymouth) or you can create your's with files I don't understand much about yet, it is the source package gfxboot-theme-ubuntu. I have found a thread in the ubuntu fr forums, which I will digg in next, in the coming weeks. Maybe you would be able to understand how that works anyhow. If not, I'll point to that thread and we will try to make a translation out of it, for a start.

One image in the boot is directly in the directory "isolinux" which is in the iso, (this is the very first image) the rest is in that one theme and will be compiled to create the file "bootlogo" which will be an archive itself containing a compiled file having for name "init". And the initrd.lz also has to be unpacked and repacked, after that : I found how after several trials and errors (initrd.lz is just an initrd.gz renamed to lz... :/ )

To get gfxboot-theme-ubuntu source package you can do as simple user "apt-get source gfxboot-theme-ubuntu".

One question : why do you need Gambas for exactly ? Isn't that a Razor QT project ? And are you really making it out of Lubuntu, or out of Debian ? (While I am here :  the Ubuntu Openbox 470 MB could be used to build on it, with the Ubuntu Builder tool).

[djohnston]

About the "plymouth theme" in the Live, it is not the plymouth theme which is used, but either a text mode theme (still having for name plymouth)

Yes, it's the text mode plymouth theme that's being used. The graphics mode theme runs after installation.

One question : why do you need Gambas for exactly ? Isn't that a Razor QT project ? And are you really making it out of Lubuntu, or out of Debian ? (While I am here :  the Ubuntu Openbox 470 MB could be used to build on it, with the Ubuntu Builder tool).

It was built from Lubuntu 12.04, just like the description says. Gambas and RazorQt are two separate unrelated projects. Gambas is a programming language/environment. Let's just say it's a temptation/inspiration for a certain person.

I downloaded your smallest 'buntu iso (187MB) and will take a look. I like to start from as close to scratch as possible. It's often easier than stripping stuff out and having to put usability back in.

[melodie]

I downloaded your smallest 'buntu iso (187MB) and will take a look. I like to start from as close to scratch as possible. It's often easier than stripping stuff out and having to put usability back in.

This one is not mine, but the Ubuntu Mini Remix which I mirror. Here is the website where it comes from:
http://www.ubuntu-mini-remix.org and it's page at Launchpad:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-mini-remix

I have had lots of issues while using it, until I end with the real necessary basis. One tip if you want to use this one anyway : you could use a "diff --aur file1 file2" on the filesystem.manifest files from both isos : this one and the 470 MB large I made on top of it. You know where they are in the iso ? In the casper directory (I use file-roller to open the isos when I just want to look at a file fast, and I can even open the files directly with Geany from there ).

And the filesystem.manifest-destkop seems to contain the same list minus the programs removed at the end of an install... something of the kind.

[djohnston]

Okay, thanks for the warning. Being very unfamiliar with *buntu, I'll download the 470MB one instead. I may wish I had started with that instead of Lubuntu.

EDIT: Your repo is fast! I'm getting about 1.75MB/sec down.

[melodie]

I have tried to tweak Lubuntu and remaster, the only times the result was almost usable was while using Remastersys. But the name of the user was still in many places of the system, issue about which I posted at the Remastersys forum, but I could not check the next advice fragadelic gave me then because I have put the machine aside for other projects. The other times, when trying to strip it and modify I did the same as konaexpress, I just broke it.

In Ubuntu Builder, I also tried to do something with Xubuntu, this also failed : after the update something happened and everything was blocked, I was unable to do any additional step.

[konaexpress]

Yea, Lubuntu does some strange stuff to work around Ubuntu I think. I have run into a couple of things that make me scratch my head from time to time.

[melodie]

No need to scratch the head... just forget about it ? Have you tried Xubuntu ? (Just curiosity)

[konaexpress]

No I have not......

One thing I did try was a short tutorial that walked the user through uninstalling Lubuntu and reinstalling LXDE onto the Ubuntu base. Worked like a charm and runs great!

[melodie]

Wouldn't that work with a full official Ubuntu as well ? Remove all Unity and Gnome and install LXDE ? XD

(I'm joking badly now!)

[konaexpress]

Yea it would work but from what I understand, it is a real PITA to do. The way I do it is around 4 or 5 commands from the terminal and a login and 1 more command line entry. No more Lubuntu stuff.....

[konaexpress]

Gambas is a programming language/environment. Let's just say it's a temptation/inspiration for a certain person.

That reminds me, I was going to look into making "Kate" in Gambas. A graphical welcome app that would allow a user to update their system and update apt-get and install a couple of packages like Gimp or  an office app.

Some text, radio buttons and a go do it button.......this could be cool.......for Katana, maybe I should call it Dojo or something like that.

[melodie]

Yea it would work but from what I understand, it is a real PITA to do. The way I do it is around 4 or 5 commands from the terminal and a login and 1 more command line entry. No more Lubuntu stuff.....

Madbox is not really close enough to the Ubuntu model, and OBUbuntu RC3 might be even too bloated, but it would be worth trying to add LXDE on both of them.

[konaexpress]

LXDE works on Madbox just fine for me, I just don't like all the orange the guy put in it.

[melodie]

LXDE works on Madbox just fine for me, I just don't like all the orange the guy put in it.

Have you found out how to customize the themes ?