Home  Spins  Releases  Repository  Themes  Garden  About  Checking










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.














































Spins by Kilz is hosted by tuxfamily.org