#aerofoil

Hello

hello

Do you know anything about packaging in Debian or Arch?

I know a bit about both. I'd have no problem researching and helping out with either. I've been dying for another project to work on =P

Also, do you have a GitHub account?

No. I have no problems creating one though

I recommend doing that now.

or as soon as possible

Will do.

Once you do, let me know the username so that I can add you to the organisation.

You know what I do have a github account that I totally forgot about. username is ragingpastry

Have you looked at aerobot?

Slightly on my cell. Right now I'm watching my toddler so I can devote my full attention to researching / looking at various things but I can later tonight. Mainly wanted to join up on IRC to see what you guys need / what your schedule for chat is like

etc

Looking at aerobot now

I see. Im in Z-08. Napcaes in Z+01. Super-nathans in Z-05. I dont know about tomswartz07. If Im not online, you can contact me at ke7ofi@openmailbox.org or the Aerofoil accounts.

Ok excellent. Great project by the way. I am excited to see how it turns out

Do you see any errors in aerobot? Im somewhat new to shell-scripting.

Sorry got a little sidetracked. Aerobot appears empty to me. Am I looking in the wrong place?

Ill take a look to see whats wrong.

Im getting a 503 on my end, but status.github.com is saying that everything is working. This may take a moment. In the meantime, take a look at https://gist.github.com/ke7ofi/dbec961e7f8ff8bb....

Will do

I don't see anything wrong with it at first glance, but like I said I have a crazy toddler running around atm. I can take a closer look later tonight

If youd rather handle your toddler than talk with a stranger about a half-finished Linux distribution (That was supposed to sound self-deprecating, but ended up sounding slightly interesting.), feel free to sign off. We can always discuss this later.

As a new dad I've discovered my multitasking skills have increased threefold so no worries. Mind if I ask you a few questions about the project?

of course not

Do you mind explaining you philosphy on the project? I saw you go into it a little bit on aerofoil.github.io and the reddit post but I was hoping you could expand on it. It sounds awesome from what I've seen

The idea is that its lighter than CrunchBang, but more usable than vanilla Arch (The second is a pretty low standard.). The as minimal as practical philosophy means that while lightness is a primary goal, its second to usability.

Its similar to i3s philosophy.

The usual elitism amongst minimal window managers: Dont be bloated, dont be fancy (simple borders are the most decoration we want to have).

However, we do not enforce unnecessary limits such as a maximum amount of source lines of code. If it needs to be a bit bigger, it will be.

(from i3wm.org)

any other questions?

Cool I definitely agree. Something easy to install with sane, clean defaults while adhering to a minimalistic standard while not going overboard

Other than the aerobot what else can I do? Point me in a direction =P

Thats what everyone says their distro is about, though, so its easier to define it by functionality.

oh I agree

Archiso is probably your best option, but for now, what do you recommend for default packages?

Neat name too. Are you an aerospace engineer or something?

I like what I've seen in the repo for default packages so far. I'll compile a list and shoot it over to you by tomorrow

Im not. I was interested in aviation when I was younger (now, too, to a lesser extent). I thought that its a good metaphor for software - the more lift it generates, the slower it is.

think

I cant grammar today.

Do you use i3?

Off and on. I mainly run bspwm on my desktop but I have used i3 as well

Do you recommend it? Im open to changing any part of the project but the as minimal as practical part, so even i3 could be replaced.

I personally enjoy it but they each have their merits. Perhaps further down the line we could add an option to install bspwm inplace of i3?

How does it compare to i3?

I was originally thinking of letting users choose between i3 and Openbox (for relative beginners).

We could offer a bunch of WMs, but I dont want to end up like LinuxBBQ.

Theyre cool, but its pretty chaotic and almost seems like it should be split into different distributions.

Whats your offset?

LinuxBBQ seemed more like a testing space for WM than an actual distro. Honestly I'd vote straight i3 for the time being

As long as we have sane defaults even novice users shouldn't have a problem with it

Plus there aren't many i3 based distro's out there as far as I am aware. It might bring something new to the game

I might actually make the default wallpaper a simple guide to i3.

There arent any besides LinuxBBQ; thats one of the reasons Im making it.

Also, Nathan created PiBang, which has i3 as an option. Im tempted to fork that section of his project and call it Pifoil.

Perhaps set the homepage to a simple guide to i3? I feel like a nice looking simplistic wallpaper goes a long way in creating a good first impression. Or maybe something during the install

I actually havn't heard of pibang, Checking it out now.

Its a Raspberry Pi clone of CrunchBang.

Ubiquity has that slideshow, but theres no way to do it in Debian. We could add an optional tutorial to preflight.

That could be very slick. Experienced users wouldn't have to waste their time and novices could take a look at it

Actually, do you want to work on preflight?

Sure

Its a nearly shameless clone of CrunchBangs cb-welcome script.

Ill give you permission to push to the relevant repo.

I only see a blank file in the preflight repo

Theres nothing yet. I havent had time to work on it yet.

Ok no problem.

Oh also what is your timetable for all of this? Are there goals in mind?

Id like a fully-functional ISO by January, which seems quite manageable, but Ive taken a page from Debians book and said that well release it when its ready.

We probably want to start out by developing a clone of cb-welcome that doesnt use custom repos.

Sounds like a good timetable to me haha

Bspwm reminds me of a Python script that was written to make i3 do the same thing. Now I feel like a dirty Emacs user.

Haha. Vim 4 life

I'm hopping off, time for the little one to go to bed. I should be back on later tonight or tomorrow. It was good talking to you man and I am excited to work with you guys on this

Im looking forward to working with you as well.

I think that aerobot is back up.

Cool. I've made some decent progress on preflight. I just need to know what we want our LIBDIR to be for our debian packages. For example the current is /usr/lib/lib-cb-welcome which contains things like apt-update, apt-dist-upgrade, install-printer-packages, etc

Also made a short list of default programs to include

We could probably put them in /usr/lib/aerofoil, then.

These are just metapackages, though, so they dont have much use except the after installing.

Im going to have to get to a class shortly.

No problem. I can send you that list in an email if you'd like.

Ill try to get back on later.

That works, but it would be better to fork the repos, commit to them, and submit PRs.

As it turns out, I have a little more free time.

Have you done either?

Not yet. I am at work at the moment. I'll do the pull request for preflight after I finish it later today.

But as for the default packages I just wanted to brainstorm what you want included

What did you have in mind?

I guess my first question would be how lightweight is the default installation?

Do you want to include things like word processors, java, etc in the default?

If you saw the metapackages, the idea is that the af-utils one consists of defaults and the others are optional.

af-utils should have a gra text editor, sound and video utilities,

Ok I did take a look at those. In that case I sent an email to aerodev

I can also do the fork and PR if that is preferred

af-utils should have a graphical text editor, sound and video utilities, graphical browser, FM, etc.

Also I like the inclusion of suckless tools =P

If you have time, please do it via Git. Thats the preferred method of contribution.

No problem

why Chromium?

Its a little lighter, but Im tempted to have 2 sets of defaults.

1 would have Firefox; the other would have dwb.

and so on

Dwb is great, but it's simply not as stable as chromium/firefox

Firefox works as well. I prefer Chromium because I've noticed it being slightly more lightweight than firefox

But I don't have a problem with Firefox

Thats sort of what I was thinking. Id like to stay away from prefered Google integration, though.

What do you think of LightDM?

If its lightweight and fairly easy to configure then I'd say great

I've never used it myself

We dont actually need a DM, though.

Well, its pretty mandatory for new users.

LightDM is slightly heavier than SLiM, but more configurable. If we use SLiM, though, we can also use slimlock, which looks nice.

Also, do you really think we need a password manager?

I'd vote include a DM by default with an option to not install it (if that is possible)

No we probably don't need a password manager in the default config, you're right.

Wed have to make a metapackage called af-recommend or something like that. It would include things like Nitrogen and SLiM.

Yea I like that.

Be right back

Have you seen i3-dmenu-desktop?

Back

Did you see the message about i3-dmenu-desktop?

I did checking it out now

I love dmenu in general

Its great. Have you seen /r/dmenu?

There are all sorts of interesting hacks there.

I havn't actually. I'll have to add that to my linux multi

i3-dmenu-desktop looks excellent

So I talked with Stapelberg about defaults, and I reached a conclusion regarding defaults. Ill see if I can find the relevant conversation.

FM: We also use alternating-layouts.py

<https://github.com/olemartinorg/i3-alternating-...;.

MS: alternating-layouts.py is an interesting choice to include in a default

setup, I think. Many users of i3 will not be familiar with that.

FM: You make a good point about user familiarity. If youve ever installed CrunchBang, youll know about cb-welcome. Aerofoil will have something similar called preflight, and I think that well make the alternation script an option that can be chosen there. That seems like a good compromise between features and familiarity.

Im thinking that we should do the same with dmenu v. i3-dmenu-desktop.

That sounds like a good plan

The options should probably be one, the other, or both bound to different keys.

What do you think they should be? They both start with D.

$mod+d and $mod+shift+d?

Which would be which?

For clarification, this is the default for i3 without the alternating layouts?

Oh demnu

dmenu*

Sorry no coffee today

Its dmenu. Do you propose a solution?

mod+shift+d would be good for the i3-dmenu-desktop i'd think

Its an advanced enough usage that the people using it would want to use dmenu to run both system bins and i3 desktop bins