Posted by member 131491 on 2004-03-13 13:59:19 link
Ok, here's where I'm at to this point....
Installed Litestep - click-click your grandma could do it simple. It runs the default theme fine, and working remotely is no problem. Didn't really notice a speed difference, but this is a fast machine and everything is quick on it anyway. So far so good. But...well, look, I really want to use Litestep. I like the concept. I like the attitude of those working on a basically free project. If I can get it working for me, a donation is in order. The M$ idea of a WM sucks a large one, and a project like this is badly needed. But I'm having enough problems that Litestep is not doing it for me at this point.
A few misc bugs kinda bother me, but no biggie. The real problem is installing themes. The default theme (no offense to the author) won't cut it for me. But some others come fairly close, at least to where I could probably do some mods to them and get about what I'm after. I tried downloading and installing 7-8 themes of the minimalist variety 'cause that's what I'm looking for. But I never got any installed sucessfully. They all needed some missing modules, and when I tried to let the Litestep theme installer download and install 'em, it would get some or most modules, but every time it failed to unzip at least one module and so install failed. One simple theme was missing only 1 module, so, feeling frisky, I tried running it without it, but that was a stupid mistake. The theme loaded, but no popup menu, no icons, no taskbar - nothing to do anything. I had no choice but to log in as administrator and run uninstall.exe using "runas" with my user ID so I could get the unit functional, as it was before with my user ID again. Then I reinstalled and tried just switching from shell to explorer (using the desktop icons) to see if I could leave Litestep installed and play with getting it right when I didn't need to get real work done. But while it does make the shell switch a after a reboot, the default Litestep wallpaper stays and will not go away. My default background is normally plain black, partly 'cause it works well when transferred by VNC with 8-bit color to the veiwer. The Litestep wallpaper is pretty bad on the viewer in 8-bit - hard to take. So I've unistalled again for now.
So it goes...I'm still going to spend more time with this, but on a test machine instead of my daily gotta-get-stuff-done unit. I think once I get the hang of simple themes and how they work, I can still do a pretty good imitation of the custom FluxBox themes I've worked up for home. In other words, I still think Litestep will let me work up a really functional Windoze desktop. I see there's good work being done here to try and make Windoze desktops at least partially as configurable as in Linux. Litestep definitely has possibilities. Thanks to those putting their time into this project.
As far as the theme problems I'm having, if anyone has suggestions, I'd sure be willing to listen and put some time into trying to make them work.
Installed Litestep - click-click your grandma could do it simple. It runs the default theme fine, and working remotely is no problem. Didn't really notice a speed difference, but this is a fast machine and everything is quick on it anyway. So far so good. But...well, look, I really want to use Litestep. I like the concept. I like the attitude of those working on a basically free project. If I can get it working for me, a donation is in order. The M$ idea of a WM sucks a large one, and a project like this is badly needed. But I'm having enough problems that Litestep is not doing it for me at this point.
A few misc bugs kinda bother me, but no biggie. The real problem is installing themes. The default theme (no offense to the author) won't cut it for me. But some others come fairly close, at least to where I could probably do some mods to them and get about what I'm after. I tried downloading and installing 7-8 themes of the minimalist variety 'cause that's what I'm looking for. But I never got any installed sucessfully. They all needed some missing modules, and when I tried to let the Litestep theme installer download and install 'em, it would get some or most modules, but every time it failed to unzip at least one module and so install failed. One simple theme was missing only 1 module, so, feeling frisky, I tried running it without it, but that was a stupid mistake. The theme loaded, but no popup menu, no icons, no taskbar - nothing to do anything. I had no choice but to log in as administrator and run uninstall.exe using "runas" with my user ID so I could get the unit functional, as it was before with my user ID again. Then I reinstalled and tried just switching from shell to explorer (using the desktop icons) to see if I could leave Litestep installed and play with getting it right when I didn't need to get real work done. But while it does make the shell switch a after a reboot, the default Litestep wallpaper stays and will not go away. My default background is normally plain black, partly 'cause it works well when transferred by VNC with 8-bit color to the veiwer. The Litestep wallpaper is pretty bad on the viewer in 8-bit - hard to take. So I've unistalled again for now.
So it goes...I'm still going to spend more time with this, but on a test machine instead of my daily gotta-get-stuff-done unit. I think once I get the hang of simple themes and how they work, I can still do a pretty good imitation of the custom FluxBox themes I've worked up for home. In other words, I still think Litestep will let me work up a really functional Windoze desktop. I see there's good work being done here to try and make Windoze desktops at least partially as configurable as in Linux. Litestep definitely has possibilities. Thanks to those putting their time into this project.
As far as the theme problems I'm having, if anyone has suggestions, I'd sure be willing to listen and put some time into trying to make them work.