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News
I think that a news feature will be helpful just to let
anyone who is interested know whats going on. There may
not be a lot of updates, but I will try and post important
changes and events.
| 5/7/23 |
An update was released, so the next
series (22.1.1) is being built. There is a new LTS
kernel 6.1. I expect the LXQt spin will be released
Monday. |
| 4/30/23 |
All the themes and wallpapers are
ready. A release should happen with the next big
Manjaro stable update. Until then I will take some
time and polish a few things. |
| 4/21/23 |
If there was one piece of advice I
would give to someone working with css or some other
code they do not know like the back of their hand,
its backup often. After two days of hard work I had
the full theme generator 98% complete. I forgot to
back it up. I made some changes to get that last two
percent done. That didnt happen, I fubar'd the
gtk 3.0 and 4.0 templates up. I thought I had a
current backup, but it was more than a day old. So
back to work I went, backing up after each little
area I worked on. Two days later its all done. The project now has a complete theme generator instead of five separate ones. This is going to make the theme very consistent, and save a lot of time. The next release series will use themes from the generator, and I am sure there will be bugs that need to be fixed. But I am also sure I will backup as much as possible, at least until a month goes by and I start some other project. :) |
| 4/17/23 |
The new Gnome shell theme is pretty
much done. There are a few tiny things I would like
to change, but its nice as it is. The advantage is
that all themes from this point on will include a
gnome shell theme. I am thinking of making this an
all in one generator. It will take a little work,
but it should be doable. |
| 4/16/23 |
I have spent a few days working on a
new gtk theme generator script. Its based on Otis,
but has had extensive changes including a complete
recreation of the gtk asset icons. The css is also
modified. Its looking real good. One advantage is
that Otis also has a Gnome Shell theme, something I
wanted to address at some point. Well no time like
the present. I already have the shell icons I need
modified for the script. Next is the css. |
| 4/11/23 |
The 22.1.0 series is
complete. It turned out to be very nice, and as a
total might be the best series of the past few. But
I think it can be better. One area I am not happy
with is the gtk theme. Specifically the dotted
outlines in some situations. I will be looking into
alternatives for the next series. |
| 3/31/23 |
The big update I was waiting for
happened today. I have started work on the 22.1.0
series. The packages for it are uploaded. I had to
do a little work on the build scripts, but
everything looks to be ok now. I expect to have LXQt
up tomorrow, and the rest will follow. |
| 3/11/23 |
The last big update was to close to
the last release series, so I put it off for one
more. Everything is ready, so the next series will
come right after the next big update. |
| 1/26/23 |
I have uploaded the first of the
22.0.1 series. The rest is going slow. I may get out
Mate-Compiz today, but it will take some luck. If
not the rest of the series should be out daily after
today. |
| 9/29/2002 |
I have a lot of spare time so I went
looking for things to fix. In September of 2021 the
project moved to a new repository. For a long time
the old repository was left as it was and it was
more or less forgotten. In June of this year I was
forced to pretty much empty it because of limited
hosting space. That brings us to today, I have
created a symlink linking the old repository to the
new repository. I am not sure how many people are
still running the old spins, but they will need to
add the new repository key to access the files,
instructions are found here. |
| 9/27/22 |
The 22.0.0 series has been done for a
few days. My foot is getting better and while it is
healing it gave me time to finish the preparations
for the next series. It also gave me time to sit and
think about what needs to be done. One area of need
was a way to backup the build server, the repository
and the theme creation setup. A day of scripting
fixed that and I can now backup everything with a
command. While it doesnt improve the spins it does
make sure that if something would happen to a hard
drive it would be easier to restore it from archives
stored in the cloud. Otherwise years of work
could be lost, and its a real possibility with my
ancient hardware. |
| 9/19/22 |
Just when things are going good, life
takes a turn. I was mowing my backyard, in a house I
have owned for over 20 years. I must have walked on
every part of that yard, or so I thought. I stepped
on a big rusty crusty nail that went into my foot. I
cleaned it out, put antibiotic ointment on it. The
next morning my foot swelled up, I went to the
emergency room. I spent over a week in the hospital, had surgery, and now have a nifty hole in my foot than needs to heal. I have been out now a few days and I am working on the 22.0.0 release that Manjaro released during my hospital stay. Its going slow, but I am half way done. I hope you like that new Pantheon spin. |
| 8/28/22 |
A few days after stopping work on the
Enlightenment spin I tried Pantheon. It has gone a
lot better. Most of the work was theme and package
selection related. The only real bug is I ran into
was getting the live environment to auto sign in.
Along with its release, likely in the next release
cycle, will be a Pantheon specific theme that may
work with other desktops, but I havent tested it
yet. Still some scripting work to do to fit the
desktop into my build/packaging setup, it should be
easy but time consuming. |
| 8/22/22 |
After pounding my head against a wall
for a day trying to change the default file manager
in Enlightenment, I am shelving this build for a
bit. The file manager that is part of
Enlightenment is just bad. I was considering Caja or
Nemo, but after trying a lot of ways to do it, it
still wont start them by default. |
| 8/21/22 |
The 21.3.7 series is done and I'm a
little bored. I have some of the theming done, and
the rest wont take to long, and a month until I will
likely release the next series. I have been looking
at Enlightenment as a possible desktop to spin. I
have created a buildiso profile and an iso. The iso
boots to the desktop, and installs. But there is a
lot of work to do. I'm not sure when it will be
ready, or if it will ever be released. But its a
start. |
| 7/18/22 |
The 21.3.4 update dropped this
morning. Its only been 21 days since Manjaro was
updated to the 21.3.1 series, but I am going to
create the SbK 21.3.4 series. Updates to stable have
been over a month at times in the past. If the next
update takes that long there would to much time
between releases. I have all the packages created
and uploaded and I will start making the iso's soon. |
| 7/9/2022 |
I went ahead with spinning the Kora
icon set. I created a color change script and
created the base package (KoraSpinBase). The base
package is in the SbK repository, but it only has
grey folders. Kora will not be in the next release
because the icons for it are already done, but they
will be in the one after that. |
| 7/7/2022 |
I am getting a little bit bored at
the moment. So I am looking for ways to improve the
spins. FlatRemix icons are nice, but the appeal they
once had is swiftly fading. I have been looking at
the Kora icon
set. There is a good chance I may Spin it. It
likely wont appear for two releases if I do. |
| 7/6/2022 | The 21.3.1 series has been out for
about a week and Manjaro has updated to 21.3.2. I
long ago gave up the idea of making two or more
series in the same month. One or even two series is
not hard to update to on a rolling release distro.
That being said the themes for the next series are
done. |
| 6/22/2022 |
I think I misunderstood what
was said on a update
post on the Manjaro forum. I thought that the
22.0 series was next, and Manjaro did not update the
lsb-release package that shows the release version.
So I named the last SbK series 22.1.b. Then Manjaro
released 21.3 after the SbK 22.1.b series was
released. In the future I will not advance the
series number if that happens again, instead I will
create a point release. At present all the theming is done for the next series. Its likely to be 21.4 or 21.5 with the release coming after the next stable update. I will delete the 22.1.b iso's from OSDN site once the next release is posted since the numbering will be off. Earlier this week I did some repository maintenance. I removed some ancient packages from a very old repository on OSDN. I created some empty package databases and uploaded them to OSDN so any users that still have not moved to the new repository will not get any errors. |