reorganize installed BL images slightly

johnraff · 2022-05-01 07:13:23

Right now bunsen-images installs login backgrounds to /usr/share/images/bunsen/login,
grub backgrounds to /boot/grub/images/bunsen (formerly /usr/share/images/bunsen/grub)
and wallpapers to /usr/share/images/bunsen/wallpapers/default

My question: what purpose does the "default" subdirectory serve? Could wallpaper background images not go directly in /usr/share/images/bunsen/wallpapers?

Would users be seriously inconvenienced if the path to installed backgrounds suddenly changed that way?

I guess a temporary bandaid for upgrades could be a symlink from /usr/share/images/bunsen/wallpapers/default/BL-Lithium.png to /usr/share/images/bunsen/wallpapers/BL-Lithium.png and leave deleting "default/" till Boron?

Last edited by johnraff (2022-05-03 08:26:36)

Bearded_Blunder · 2022-05-01 10:48:51

The "default" sub directory would make a kind of sense, if the image archive package landed directories for previous releases beside it... that way a user browsing from their pictures folder into wallpapers would actually find them, and theoretically so would the wallpaper picker since it comes with the recurse option checked by default it could be maybe pointed at the wallpapers directory & show the extras when you install them.

Currently if you don't know you need to add extra paths in the wallpaper chooser, and what paths you need to add, then you're left wondering what the image archive package actually did when you installed it.

Last edited by Bearded_Blunder (2022-05-01 11:07:05)

hhh · 2022-05-01 17:34:49

I'd say let's not get too fussy about it, as you can set a user-defined login/lockscreen background (from your local Wallpapers folder, no less!) via our Login Interface menu item (lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings), and you can also search for files with "login" in the name to locate the directories.

That said, simplicity is a nice thing, especially in computing, so I'm down for whatever.

johnraff · 2022-05-02 08:07:03

Yes, (thanks @B_B) I'd forgotten about the archives. In fact, instead of what we do now, it might indeed be better if the former release wallpapers were put in "helium" etc directories alongside "default" (which we should keep).

Then, what about "grub" and "login"? These would probably need to be chosen manually anyway. Also from Beryllium the grub image will be in /boot/grub/images/bunsen (because of encrypted disks), not in /usr/share/images/bunsen/grub. Drop the "<releasename>" directory from archives in there alongside default.png, beam.png and lithium.png?

And yes we've got some redundancy here with the same images coming from archives that bunsen-images already provides...

Bearded_Blunder · 2022-05-03 06:00:18

johnraff wrote:

Then, what about "grub" and "login"? These would probably need to be chosen manually anyway. Also from Beryllium the grub image will be in /boot/grub/images/bunsen (because of encrypted disks), not in /usr/share/images/bunsen/grub. Drop the "<releasename>" directory from archives in there alongside default.png, beam.png and lithium.png?

Sounds good.

Would potentially be nice if beam.png & lithium.png showed up in Debian Alternatives for desktop-grub instead of having to manually add that.

Another thought is that the image archive package is set to grow each release, one wonders if it'd be an idea to split it out to a package per prior release, so if someone wanted say just the helium images they wouldn't need to pull in all the other releases too, though that might complicate the question in bl-welcome regarding installing it.

johnraff · 2022-05-03 08:25:30

Bearded_Blunder wrote:

Would potentially be nice if beam.png & lithium.png showed up in Debian Alternatives for desktop-grub instead of having to manually add that.

Good idea and easily done.

Maybe also just name the image after the release instead of putting it in a named subfolder? ie /boot/grub/images/bunsen/helium.png instead of /boot/grub/images/bunsen/helium/default.png?

Another thought is that the image archive package is set to grow each release, one wonders if it'd be an idea to split it out to a package per prior release, so if someone wanted say just the helium images they wouldn't need to pull in all the other releases too, though that might complicate the question in bl-welcome regarding installing it.

Yes it would complicate the welcome script. Let's leave them all together for now, and possibly rethink it if archives grows huge. People really short of disk space and download bandwidth maybe have other things to worry about than getting exactly the retro image set for an obsolete BL release?

johnraff · 2022-05-03 08:41:42

Rather than open a new topic, I'll raise this idea here, since it's still about organizing the images (edited topic title).

Thinking of throwing in a symlink named "default" (no file ending) pointing to the current default wallpaper, in wallpapers/default. (The "default/default" filepath is unfortunate, but can't be helped.) That way the, er, default config files can point to "default" and won't need changing for Boron and following. Of course users will still be free to use whatever image they want.

Same in the "login" directory, in fact pointing to the default wallpaper in Beryllium's case.

LightDM seems to have no trouble with file endings and accepts jpg or png files named "default". (Will do a bit more testing to make sure.)

Nitrogen will not display in the gui selector the "default" symlink unless it's named default.png or default.jpg, but that would defeat the purpose of being able to switch file type down the road. Luckily (again needs more thorough testing) it seems to be OK with /usr/share/images/bunsen/wallpapers/default/default in ~/.config/nitrogen/bg-saved.cfg
Not displaying the symlink in the gui isn't that important I guess, because the file it points to will still be there.

Bearded_Blunder · 2022-05-03 11:29:53

johnraff wrote:

Maybe also just name the image after the release instead of putting it in a named subfolder? ie /boot/grub/images/bunsen/helium.png instead of /boot/grub/images/bunsen/helium/default.png?

Sounds good to me.

Luckily (again needs more thorough testing) it seems to be OK with /usr/share/images/bunsen/wallpapers/default/default in ~/.config/nitrogen/bg-saved.cfg
Not displaying the symlink in the gui isn't that important I guess, because the file it points to will still be there.

What happens when someone changes, saves the change, & then goes to change back?
Do they see the default wall to pick it again, or do they have to go hunting &/or adding paths?
I suppose I ought to test for myself.

johnraff · 2022-05-04 04:46:06

Bearded_Blunder wrote:

What happens when someone changes, saves the change, & then goes to change back?
Do they see the default wall to pick it again, or do they have to go hunting &/or adding paths?
I suppose I ought to test for myself.

They won't see "default" per se in Nitrogen's selector GUI unfortunately - it seems to ignore files without an image-type file ending. But the image that "default" points to will be there with its real name and thumbnail image, as long as it's inside nitrogen's recursive search tree, so user ought to be able to find it. It's not ideal, but if the user never knew about the default symlink anyway, might be acceptable?

Even if "default" points somewhere outside the wallpaper tree, 'nitrogen --restore' still sets that image as wallpaper, so it's an issue with the gui, not with nitrogen's ability to use the symlink to set the wallpaper.

Only files with the "right" endings are accepted as images:
https://github.com/l3ib/nitrogen/blob/6 … il.cc#L246
But I guess the code that actually sets wallpaper is less picky.

Bearded_Blunder · 2022-05-04 05:04:12

I don't see it as an issue if the thumb for the actual wallpaper is there with its official name to be selected. So long as the default image is somewhere that shows up, it seems a perfectly viable solution.

johnraff · 2022-05-04 05:08:32

Two more suggestions before moving to wrap this up:

There are quite a lot of extra wallpapers currently shipped in bunsen-images (not the default images in bunsen-images-base):
Before-Sunrise.jpg BL-Lithium-grey-logo-only.png BL-networks.png
BL-beam-plain.png BL-Lithium-logo-only.png grey.png
BL-Fever_Room.jpg BL-Lithium.png Yeti.jpg

1) Install these in /usr/share/images/bunsen/wallpapers, not in the final default/ directory?

2) Most of these came with Lithium and could reasonably now go in bunsen-images-archives, but how about from now on, a policy of shipping the previous release's wallpaper - default only or maybe all - in bunsen-images? So with Boron the Lithium wallpapers would go in archives. And additionally, make sure that any wallpapers used by our preset BLOB configs are provided in bunsen-images?

---
And to confirm:
the most useful set of wallpaper sizes to ship would be:
1920X1080
1440x900
1280x1024
and of these 1440x900 would be set as default in the configs?

Named BL-Beryllium-1440x900.jpg etc?
In fact, I was wondering about dropping the initial BL- from images named after BL releases - the origin should be obvious anyway - although the BL- would make them all sort together with ls or the nitrogen GUI.

(Although I don't think we should rename currently used images more than necessary, so as not to mess up peoples' personal configs.)

Last edited by johnraff (2022-05-04 05:10:20)

Bearded_Blunder · 2022-05-04 05:40:07

I've no real opinion on what extras ought or ought not to ship.
As to dropping the BL- prefix, they'll still group by release, which ought to be acceptable.

What resolutions to ship, & which to set as default is a bit thorny, what's most common varies by region, & what is a compromise that looks OK on multiple others vs setting the actual most common as the default is a difficult question.

In terms of outright usage then 1920x1080 wins worldwide by some margin according to this site it's close to 25% of screens in Europe nearer 20% in the USA (with a higher proportion of higher resolutions).

First past the post, as the likeliest to be actually correct,1920x1080 wins, on the other hand, 1440x900 is the likeliest to still look OK if it's not right, including on 1920x1080 screens. 1280x1024 is basically there for old "square" monitors, where neither of the others really sit well.

If you look at the variation on that stats site you start to understand why Debian themselves ship a boatload of different ones.

That and the fact that the actual highest line on the chart is combined "Other" after the 10 or so they do list....

At least one of the 3 we have should look acceptable on anything besides ultra-wide screens though.

Last edited by Bearded_Blunder (2022-05-04 05:45:35)

johnraff · 2022-05-04 05:58:40

OK I'm going AWOL for a couple of days from tomorrow.

If no-one has further opinions on any of the above when I get back I'll push out the revised image packages, and move on to getting our beta iso out.

@hhh maybe some day you'll have time to make nicely proportioned 1440x900 and 1280x1024 wallpapers based on BL-Beryllium.jpg

But in the meantime I'll just hack something out with gimp. We can substitute the nice versions later.

Bearded_Blunder · 2022-05-04 06:12:44

jonraff wrote:

But in the meantime I'll just hack something out with gimp.

If hacked ones will do, there's always the ones I posted...

1280x1024 1440x900
Just expand the thumbnail, right click & save image as.

johnraff · 2022-05-04 06:20:40

^excellent, thanks!
Forgot about those.

johnraff · 2022-05-11 07:49:52

EDIT: Please ignore this post - it wasn't going anywhere. For Archives to be mixed in with the rest the files would have to be renamed.

I guess my main problem with the "default" directory was the name. To potentially mess up peoples' configs (and rewrite ours) for the sake of a cooler name makes no sense at all.

B_B's proposal to keep "default" for all the wallpapers shipped by bunsen-images, and put the Archive wallpapers in "helium" and "hydrogen" alongside, is the neatest way to go.

Bearded_Blunder wrote:

The "default" sub directory would make a kind of sense, if the image archive package landed directories for previous releases beside it... that way a user browsing from their pictures folder into wallpapers would actually find them, and theoretically so would the wallpaper picker since it comes with the recurse option checked by default it could be maybe pointed at the wallpapers directory & show the extras when you install them.

You know, the more I think about this, the less reason I see for having different release's wallpapers separated in subdirectories. They're all named independently after all, like BL-Lithium.png, so why not drop all of them in the same directory? Right now the "default" directory would only contain
Beryllium-1280x1024.jpg Beryllium-1920x1080.jpg Beryllium-1440x900.jpg and default (the symlink to Beryllium-1440x900.jpg)
which would all be quite happy alongside BL-Fever_Room.jpg, and eg the Hydrogen images like flame-text-1920x1200-centre-blue.png (The latter would need BL-Hydrogen- prepending to keep the naming consistent I guess.)

So the "Archives" wallpapers could just be dumped in /usr/share/images/bunsen/wallpapers along with everything else, and they would all appear in the Nitrogen GUI.

Any problem with that I've overlooked?

PS keep the "default" directory for this release, don't use it, but put symlinks there to the moved (and possibly renamed) image files in the parent "wallpapers" so users' existing config files will still work, at least till Boron.

PS2 rethinking the archives. Those Helium and Hydrogen image files would need renaming to make it obvious where they came from, so after all it's probably cleaner to put the archive wallpapers in "Helium" and "Hydrogen" subdirectories, even if "default" could be got rid of, having all the current images together in /usr/share/images/bunsen/wallpapers/.

Last edited by johnraff (2022-05-11 23:42:14)

johnraff · 2022-05-11 23:43:38

^Please ignore the above post (see EDIT at the top). I could have just deleted it (mods' privileges) but I don't like rewriting history like that.

johnraff · 2022-05-12 06:36:32

For bunsen-images I removed the initial BL- from some image files, made the new first letter upper case if it seemed appropriate (eg BL-networks.png > Networks.png) and added some temporary symlinks (till Boron) for backward compatibility. The file paths will otherwise remain the same. (Until the symlinks are removed, both names will appear in Nitrogen's GUI.)

bunsen-images 11.3-1 uploaded.

Bunsen-images-archives hasn't been updated yet.

Last edited by johnraff (2022-05-13 06:13:42)

johnraff · 2022-05-13 06:14:00

bunsen-images-archives 11.1-1 uploaded.

#1 2022-05-01 07:13:23

reorganize installed BL images slightly

#2 2022-05-01 10:48:51

Re: reorganize installed BL images slightly

#3 2022-05-01 17:34:49

Re: reorganize installed BL images slightly

#4 2022-05-02 08:07:03

Re: reorganize installed BL images slightly

#5 2022-05-03 06:00:18

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#6 2022-05-03 08:25:30

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#7 2022-05-03 08:41:42

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#8 2022-05-03 11:29:53

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#9 2022-05-04 04:46:06

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#10 2022-05-04 05:04:12

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#11 2022-05-04 05:08:32

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#12 2022-05-04 05:40:07

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#13 2022-05-04 05:58:40

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#14 2022-05-04 06:12:44

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#15 2022-05-04 06:20:40

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#16 2022-05-11 07:49:52

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#17 2022-05-11 23:43:38

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#18 2022-05-12 06:36:32

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#19 2022-05-13 06:14:00

Re: reorganize installed BL images slightly

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