Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

I'm trying to find a place to change the scroll bar so it's wide enough to grab. Not having much luck Anyone know if / where there might be a setting for that ?

editres ?

The less elegant method would be to manually change .Sgiresources or .Xresources. You'll probably want to double check my googled up syntax in the man pages before you pull the trigger, but something like:

editres doesn't like me very much


Check ? you gots to be kidding. I'm a trigger-puller. Sadly, no luck with that so far but excellent suggestion ! I was searching in 4Dwm, should searh under Motif or maybe mwm ... back to Boogle, thanks !

btw, while rooting around I found an interesting tidbit - the adjustments for frame width and cursor-grab frame width are different. So (I think) you can set the frame width skinny for appearances (if you like that) but the frame grabber w i d e for convenience. Pretty nice !

[REDACTED]

Wasn't paying attention - you meant 4Dwm itself. "Oh... Nevermind."

Come back later, you can redact the bad words from what I have to say about Fireflop ... gawd that program is a pile of shit Thunderturd, five minutes research and ten more with userChrome.css and it's okay. Not perfect but okay.

Fireflop, change this and that changes. Change that and this changes. How to change what you really want ? The Fine Mozilla Organization has a help-you page ! Full of examples of help-you things you can do ! But not one single item that's actually useful !

What universe do those idiots come from ? Can we arrange a pre-emptive strike ?

Still haven't got a way to widen scroll bars yet ... but 33 hz is plenty fast on refresh. You can't tell it isn't 60 or 72 or 85. (But I don't play games. Movies are fine.)

On to a more pleasant subject ... it's pretty easy to change icon sizes and fonts in the 4Dwm file manager. Unfortunately, if you had "save continuously" checked all the sizes you don't want got saved and apparently unchecking it doesn't get rid of the old data so now things are all different sizes. Is there a system-wide way to clear out all those saved attributes ?

At the risk you might not know this; I'll point out that when you make changes to an X resources file you have to do `xrdb -merge filename` for them to take effect. That, or log out and back in again. Also, for editres to work editres support has to be compiled into the application, and not many vendors do that...

I noticed that you can actually just do a "xrdb <filename>" and that seems to work too. Maybe that's the default on Irix ?

Most of 4Dwm has been pretty straightforward ... still haven't found a scrollbar adjustment but other than that, not so bad. Did learn how to set colors in an application to follow the desktop scheme, which was kind of cool.

It's that useless unpredictable piece of garbage Fireflop that is the biggest problem. userChrome.css doesn't work for crap. No surprise there .... I just wish the next time somone decides to go postal that they would do it in the Mozilla bunker.

Does the 4dwm stuff speak editres? I'll have to check it when I get home, can't do it at work anymore as the PTB took my Octane away and gave me a cursed Sun Blade 2500 in it's place...

The trick with editres is to use it to flash the widgets until you find the right one, then change the resource for that. It's the filemanager scrollbar that you're trying to modify, or what?

What version of Fireflop do you use? I don't use my SGI to browse anymore, since my Linux box is sitting right next to it and I "upgraded" to Fireflop 15 last night, it seems to work pretty good...

All the scrollbars, actually. Title bar, menu bar, frames were pretty easy. Just have to find the scroll bar now.

One reason I never liked editres before was that it was so huge, you could only see about three widgets on-screen at a time. Now it's better There are probaly some changeable defaults to deal with that but I never bothered.

While on the subject, does anyone know where to find mre ? The original Motif Resource Editor ? It was apparently common in the very early days but seems to have turned to coal


Diegel's latest. I use the SGI Irix platform

The exact same problems exist in Windows tho, which I use daily so that I can have reliable data for bitching purposes. That and to ensure that the Asisstant hasn't downloaded half the oeuvre of the entire Korean pop singer subclass ...


Fireflop works fine as long as you're a Nazi . (Derived from the saying of a Jewish friend : "The third reich was actually pretty good - as long as you were a nazi.") If you have a fast connection and go along with their program, it's fine. Yes, sir ! No, sir ! three bags full, sir !

But if you are not "normal", well, off to the camps. If you have a slow connection and flaky dns, fireflop sucks. If you want to change it to suit your ideas of appearance and functionality, too effing bad. "Download this extension ! Download that extension !" Go stick a ten inch dildo up your butt, jack. I don't want fifty-three fricking extensions, I want to change the text size in the menu bar without changing the text size everywhere else.

The real killer with this pos is that it's basically designed wrong. Every tab should be a separate process. We have fast multi-core processors these days. We've moved past the 486DX. Who cares about the .000032 second overhead of creating a new process ? What us users care about is not locking up the entire application when one page is very slow or refuses to load at all. And it would be real nice if one page crashing did not take down the entire application. Sure, if you are on the termination point of a T1 line you'll never see this. But out here in East Bumfuckistan, we have these problems. And they are extremely annoying.

but hey ! they're number one in market share ! (for a free product, ain't that special ?)

edit: editres is a lot easeir to use with higher resolution ... you can actually see more of the structure. So I can find the scroll bars, I can change their trough color, I can move them around, I can see a category for "width" but the scroll handle is unresponsive to changing that resource. Does the size of the pixmap that is the scroll handle determine the width, do you s'pose ?

Mitch Trachtenberg wrote mre, you could axe him about finding source or a binary, his gmail is mjtrac, my guess would be he'll tell you it's obsolete crap and to use editres anyway.

I don't know about having each fireflop window/tab be a separate process, since on my Linux box fireflop can't seem to instantiate itself without grabbing at least 135 meg of RAM. 'Course that wouldn't be a problem on my Octane, which has 8 gig of RAM (thanks to our beloved nekochan member RichTom1) but my lowly Linux box is barely scraping by with a meager 2 gig at the moment. Though it does have two Xeons...

What the heck, never hurts to try. Obsoletecrap is my middle name


11,895k here but doesn't seem to handle it very well ...


and about 11,895 more like unto that ...

Yikes! If it wasn't for the variadic macros in Dillo I'd have had it running on our sgi's months ago, it can't possibly be worse than that debacle...

ehh... hamei, you're generally spot on - whether you're ranting or not - but our Fuels run processors from yesteryear, each powered by a single asthmatic hamster. That's not so far past the 486DX.

Ha ! That's what you think ! I upgraded to an O350. I now have the power of two asthmatic hamsters, running full-tilt in their special SGI-designed contra-rotating hamster wheels.

Thet's some awesomeness, babe !

You've obviously forgotten how slow a 486 really is

But I have to admit, for 90% of desktop use a dual PPro Overdrive was plenty nice. A 2.4 ghz P4 is no better. And whatever dual-core thingy they put in the Intel Macbooks about a year ago is no better either. I mentioned it elsewhere but spent the past few weeks tethered to a Macbook and an iPad, was happy to tears to get back to Irix on hamster power.

I'd love a faster cpu but not enough to give up everything else that comes with Irix.

I'm calling the RSPCA right now . I expect them to be turning up on your doorstep in full riot gear to rescue those poor little furry critters.

Congrats on the O350 - that's about as good as it'll get for a 'workstation' SGI machine


I loved my 486DX. 40Mhz in a stupidly large towercase with a SCSI-II drive chain running off an AHA1540 and an ET4000 driving a no-curve Compaq branded 17" CRT. It blew past all my mates' machines at uni. Well, it did once I had finished fiddling with modelines in XFree86 and downloading Slackware onto 900 3.5" floppies and getting my dial-up tcp/ip connection to the uni modem banks sorted so i could display X-clients installed on the uni's sunos4 servers. Ah, those were the days.


Macbook and ipad... Ugh I broke my 2011 macbook air a few weeks ago and had to get a 2012 macbook air. The 2011 macbook air ran 10.6 Snow Leopard and once you got used to all the cr*p that is OS X, it was a nice enough desktop operating system. But the 2012 unit comes with Mountain Lion and all the iCloud mess and vendor uber lock-in it heralds is just miserable.

Ha ha, English bounder ! We have no SPCA here. In fact, we spit in their faces. Send me baby chickens to stomp !


Eventually I hope to have them stacked four high, just to drive the monitor. One with processors and the rest along for the ride ... Now that will be one honkin' big graphics card


Similar feelings but with OS/2. Same lovely experience with XFree/86 tho. Then I got an Indigo and discovered remote login, remote display, remote fun. Finally bought a dual PPro, overclocked it to 240 mhz and that was good. Upgraded to Overdrives at 333 mhz, Intel computing hasn't got any better since.


It's not entirely intolerable but yeah, I like Irix a lot better. I like BeOS better too. Too bad there aren't any programs for it. Could be interesting to run Haiku on a Macbook ....

If you have a machine that boots from a USB stick you can run it off that. I have a dedicated machine for it and another I run of a IUSB stick and I think I've got a VirtualBox or VMware image of it somewhere which is what most people use.. I was a programmer for it. I wrote an article about it and a ray tracer for it. It is really nice to program for it but if you code for BeOS. Haiku or whatever generally no one uses it and even less care.


R.

I'm not so much into playing with fifty different operating systems anymore. It was fun at one time but one or maybe two would be enough now.


The direction with Apple is no longer computing, it's more of a novelty status wackoff thing now. Chances of this happening are one in ten thousand but something like the Longson laptop done very lightweight with a big screen running BeOS in a French-inspired case could be nice.

If BeOS could read and write doc and xls files, read/write pdf's, do email and basic web browsing, that would be an okay travelling machine. OS X sucks. Apple sucks. Microsoft sucks. All they care about is maximizing their profits and controlling markets and paying off idiot "tech writers", not making good software. And the idiots keep buying their crap .... not much excitement in the computing world these days. Good thing hardware is so capable now. It's like great boobs on Phyllis Diller, what's the point ?