Carbon alpha iso available for testing

hhh · 2025-10-23 08:08:13

johnraff wrote:

^yes, just set the colours to system theme, and leave the other settings at default?

Yes. The preferences are all in the GUI, so easy enough for user customization.

micko01 · 2025-10-24 00:14:19

Just for the record, xfce4-terminal is fine with wayland as is lxterminal. Pretty much anything gtk3 onwards on the GTK side and qt5 onwards on the Qt side are wayland compatible.

johnraff · 2025-10-24 05:14:12

Menu icons discussion has been split off here:
https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=9574
Anyone with suggestions/opinions please join in.

johnraff · 2025-10-25 05:48:00

This kind of feedback is so helpful!

sleekmason wrote:

On live boot, conky is hard to see.. Consider moving it, Changing the text color, or changing the configuration to 'draw_shades = true,' and finding a matching dark brown color that will work well. Currently it is set to black.

Conky hasn't been touched so far - I was hoping someone might come up with a suitable Carbon version. (Do you notice a difference between Conky on the live desktop and the installed version?) I don't suppose you feel like doing it? You seem to be using Conky these days. Just the minimal changes needed to make it useful on our Bark (preferably Sage too) wallpaper.

...the menu icons. There are a few missing in the Settings section of the Applications Menu.

Icons discussion split here: https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=9574 @micko01 seems to have it well in hand.

I would suggest rewriting the Live welcome screen and shrinking it a bit for those who check out BL in a VM.

Agreed it is a bit big on my VM too. Shrink the width, and the length goes possibly off the screen, so yes the text would need to be reduced a bit. Any suggestions?

Speaking of VM's, the dang 3d issue with Picom this round should be addressed. Lots of people know how to start up a VM, but can't be bothered with changing internal settings. - Is it possible to start without Picom enabled? or maybe just for the live session?

It looks as if between Bookworm and Trixie Picom has changed to the point of needing 3D acceleration and openGL. That caused me a lot of grief too, especially now I can't get Wayland to work except without openGL. This arcane graphics stuff is way outside my comfort zone, and I just enact whatever settings Virt-Manager and People on the Internet propose. Now my Carbon-testing VM is configured with 3D acceleration and openGL which breaks Wayland sessions for me (not for @Head_on_a_Stick apparently).

As for Picom disabled... we need some input from our other devs here, as to how important the drop shadows and round corners are for the default BL appearance. I think they do make a significant difference. If we're talking about a Lite or Base install then Picom is already disabled out of the box. For the iso install, I'm not sure. Maybe it would be possible to add a button to the Live welcome message to switch off compositing? That would require that the message dialog works OK while Picom is running. Alternatively, a button to switch it on might be easier to implement? This all means yet more text in the welcome dialogue, which we were trying to reduce...

The blue highlight color in the installer could be changed to match the other grub menu highlight colors.

Should be indeed. I'll have a look, it might not be too difficult.

As above, I would also match the highlight colors of the installed grub menu and the ISO boot menu highlight colors to keep things uniform.

Yes. Although I think colour choice on the boot screen is very limited.

Welcome script is very nice. Very well developed information!

Thanks! A lot of work has gone into bl-welcome (not only by me) over a period of years, going right back to CrunchBang.
I've just uploaded a new version which is supposed to be able to handle apt sources deb822 modernization and explicit signed-by entries.

Display - So, even though it's right there in the menu, Its right there!! it seems hard to find ARandr, and the settings dialog for it would freak out a newcomer in my opinion.
So.. mainly for VM use, consider the possibility of using lxrandr? (419kb installed) (screenshot), in at least the live session, It is about as simple as it gets for changing basic display geometry.

As a replacement for arandr (agreed, not easy to figure out) in the default menu? I've never used lxrandr but I'll give it a try today. Thanks for the hint.

Again, mainly for use in a VM, but this does seem the way most are trying out new distros these days.

Since i386 support went away I've lost my testing laptop, so all my development - right up till the final iso install - is on VMs now. Perhaps I should go out and find a cheapo 64bit laptop just for trial installs.

The whole qt thing... man... I'm just using the qt5gtk and qt6gtk packages that were linked from the forum here, and they work fine with "export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2". using qt5ct or qt6ct is an option to set the other qt settings, but it will probably throw an error without the qt5-gtk-platformtheme. I'm currently leaving them out. They are not necessary, but are lightweight.

Thanks. That's another zone (there are many) where I'm at a loss. The discussion with @greenjeans and @HoaS has been inconclusive. When you say "qt5gtk and qt6gtk packages" you mean qt5gtk2 and qt6gtk2 ? Sorry, what's "qt5ct or qt6ct"? And whether to set QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME to gtk2 or qt5gtk2 ? It would be nice to have a consensus here. Greenjeans reported qt6gtk2 brought in ~80MB of dependencies, which might or might not be significant these days. These are decisions I'd love somebody else to make!

greenjeans wrote:

Love to get triple-h's thoughts on this.

Me too. @hhh are you there?

Is there a fix for those programs requiring gtk-4.0? if not, consider changing programs like transmission-gtk and file-roller to their gtk counterparts. Probably qbitttorrent and xarchiver for those two, though there are others.

A fix for what? What issues have come up with transmission-gtk and file-roller? (I've tried xarchiver in the past and didn't like it so much. qbittorrent sounds like more qt stuff...)

Thanks again @sleekmason for the time you've put into this.

johnraff · 2025-10-25 05:51:44

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

johnraff wrote:
it seems that Wayland will only run smoothly on QXL. Unless you know some workaround?
Wayland works just fine for me with the virtio-pci driver running with virtio-gpu passthrough from the host; glmark2-wayland reports no errors and records decent framerates, even on my low end hardware.

Could this be because you are running qemu on a Wayland host, not an X11 host like me?

MarkW · 2025-10-25 09:06:27

3D acceleration?

Is it 2015 again?

sleekmason · 2025-10-25 14:41:02

In reverse order:

Unklar wrote:
I wouldn't make any color changes, and this has nothing to do with draw_shades ...

looked like a simple solution to me, though not the best necessarily. Once enabled, you can clearly see the words.

My two cents is I would leave the conky alone, as there is consistency there we don't want to lose. I would simply switch to the sage theme as the current conky looks super sharp on that wallpaper, but note that I personally prefer the Sage theme anyway. If not, I would probably enable shades for visibility or move the conky, but that is just me. I'm not sure why shades wouldn't be an option if needed. I'm guessing @unklar has his reasons for this. I bow to his knowledge here.

Johnraff wrote:
A fix for what? What issues have come up with transmission-gtk and file-roller? (I've tried xarchiver in the past and didn't like it so much. qbittorrent sounds like more qt stuff...)

Both use gtk-4.-0, and will open in white unless the dconf settings @hhh supplied in another post are utilized.

His idea was to change the preference for gtk-colorscheme under /gtk/gnome/desktop/interfaces to "prefer-dark", which will then use the default Adwaita-dark theme for the colors. Nice find! However, this can effect other items as well (pavucontrol comes to mind), but, the Yaro theme is close enough that people probably wouldn't be bothered by the difference for just a few programs, if the fix works.

In short, I would give the dconf setting a shot first to see how it does overall, and place a dconf file in ~/.config with the adjusted setting. otherwise, change programs or just accept the white color.

When you say "qt5gtk and qt6gtk packages" you mean qt5gtk2 and qt6gtk2 ? Sorry, what's "qt5ct or qt6ct"?

Yes, the qt5gtk2 and qt6gtk2 packages. Yeah, the whole thing is a bit of a mess isn't it:) From what I can tell, the two packages I just listed replace qt5-gtk-platformtheme and qt6-gtk-platformtheme, and will indeed take care of qt5 - gtk2 and qt6 - gtk2 matching without any further packages or adjustments. This was tested with luckybackup (qt5) and Oracle Virtualbox (gtk6)

qt5ct and qt6ct are very small programs (213kb) to control different aspects of qt theming. Everything from fonts to icons.. However, without qt5-gtk-platformtheme and qt5-gtk-platformtheme, they will probably not work.

* Easy enough to check out without consequence. apt install qt5ct, and then just qt5ct in a terminal to see what's there. A conf file is kept in ~/.config for changes, so I was really hoping I could get those to work.

I am having success with "export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2"

To sum that up, I'm still experimenting with all of this, but just those two packages and the line for .xsessions seems to be the current fix.

Yes. Although I think colour choice on the boot screen is very limited.

Yeah:) Probably need to match the others colors to this to keep it simple.

----
Having picom on is a great visual advantage, and shows the effort put into the distro. Hard choice there. Having an instant switch for it would be awesome. Something along the lines of:

"Running bunsenlabs in a Virtual Environment may require the disabling of the compositor until installed. This will ensure all programs open as they should. If use of the compositor is desired, consider enabling 3D support in the settings of your VM."

And then either a question as to whether to disable it or not if in the welcome script, and/or a button on the panel to simply toggle compositing on and off. <-- this one I would think. I know we are trying to keep away from such things, but a button toggle might be worth keeping as a feature if it can be placed well.

Yes a bit of work, but what else to do other than leave it go? and that does not seem like a good answer for this one.

Trixie has been a fun ride forward. A lot of work this round it seems. :)

I'll post a possible welcome message here a bit later today for more review.

greenjeans · 2025-10-25 19:30:55

Greenjeans reported qt6gtk2 brought in ~80MB of dependencies, which might or might not be significant these days.

To clarify: I was testing on a minimal system that had no qt6 apps and no qt6 libraries whatsoever just to gauge the impact of including it in case a user DID decide to install a qt6 app. It may have been somewhat less than 80 mb, I do remember that it just didn't seem worth it to me.

Does Carbon have any qt6 apps pre-installed? If so you may have all the libraries you need already.

I'm still running the exact same setup that sleekmason mentioned above for many weeks now, still working great.

RE: GTK4 since it was mentioned above with regard to some theme issues, there's now a GTK4-nocsd package in it's early stages that might work for the apps mentioned. https://codeberg.org/MorsMortium/GTK4-NoCSD

sleekmason · 2025-10-25 20:06:40

@greenjeans wrote: RE: GTK4 since it was mentioned above with regard to some theme issues, there's now a GTK4-nocsd package in it's early stages that might work for the apps mentioned. https://codeberg.org/MorsMortium/GTK4-NoCSD

Nice find! :) Have you tried building it yet?

----

Okay, so just consolidating the already present information into a smaller format as a possibility. The length didn't change much in the end.

Change any and all of it! or don't use it at all. No worries. Just a fun exercise to me:) Probably someone else can correct it more.

However, I do hope it can be useful. You shouldn't have to adjust the existing yad line much if any, unless wanting more space under the final line, or smaller borders. This is based on I'm assuming just the default system font? If so, it should align.

If not, just let me know what is used and I can adjust the type if needed. It does lose some white space, but should make up for some of that with the formatting. The screenshots below show what I mean it to look like.

                           <big><b>Welcome to BunsenLabs Live!</b></big>

The Live operating system lets you test BunsenLabs without needing
to make changes to your computer's hard drive.

This live session can also be used for system recovery, or other tasks
like checking on hardware compatibility for your keyboard, monitor,
and network connections.

Keyboard shortcuts are listed on the desktop for all of the programs
most frequently used in Bunsenlabs. Note that the 'super' key is also
the same as the 'windows' key on your keyboard.

Changing your keyboard layout is easy if required. in a terminal, use:
'<b>setxkbmap xx</b>', where 'xx' is the country code for your layout.
See '/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.lst' for a full list.

For this live session, your username is '<b>user</b>' and your root password
is '<b>live</b>'. You already have sudo permissions.

To install Bunsenlabs, please reboot this ISO and use: 'Start installer'
or choose 'Advanced install' for further control.

				    Thank you for trying <b>BunsenLabs Linux</b>!

Edit* the line to use for the VM warning would have to be something simple like:

Using Bunsenlabs in a Virtual Environment may require the disabling
of the compositor to function correctly.

And possibly share where a button is..? My long explanation a few threads up wasn't going to serve:) Anyway, all can be adjusted for line spacing too, though it starts to get crowded.

------------------------
And a second note that when I booted earlier in a VM, I noticed the line said 'debian' instead of Bunsenlabs', however, I could have sworn it said Bunsenlabs the second time. so.. yeah. I'll try to catch what's going on there.

Last edited by sleekmason (2025-10-25 21:00:06)

greenjeans · 2025-10-25 22:27:58

RE: File-Roller; Engrampa is the Mate fork of file-roller, it still uses gtk3 in Trixie and is almost identical in function.

That's disappointing about Transmission. That will likely get me to try and build gtk4-nocsd when the time comes, right now my projects are still bookworm based and i've gotten rid of anything that uses gtk4.

Last edited by greenjeans (2025-10-25 22:35:33)

johnraff · 2025-10-26 09:41:35

johnraff wrote:

sleekmason wrote:
Display - So, even though it's right there in the menu, Its right there!! it seems hard to find ARandr, and the settings dialog for it would freak out a newcomer in my opinion.
So.. mainly for VM use, consider the possibility of using lxrandr? (419kb installed) (screenshot), in at least the live session, It is about as simple as it gets for changing basic display geometry.
As a replacement for arandr (agreed, not easy to figure out) in the default menu? I've never used lxrandr but I'll give it a try today. Thanks for the hint.

Tried out lxrandr today and it is quite easy to use. I have yet to see what happens whan you plug in an external display though.

One glitch is that when you choose to save the config it goes into an autostart file with an entry:

OnlyShowIn=LXDE

So although it holds the xrandr command to set the new display size, it doesn't get run. We can fix this though, with a wrapper script which comments out the above line after lxrandr exits. I think that would work, if we decide to switch to lxrandr.

johnraff · 2025-10-26 09:46:22

sleekmason wrote:

Johnraff wrote:
A fix for what? What issues have come up with transmission-gtk and file-roller? (I've tried xarchiver in the past and didn't like it so much. qbittorrent sounds like more qt stuff...)
Both use gtk-4.-0, and will open in white unless the dconf settings @hhh supplied in another post are utilized.

Can you give me a link to that post? Nothing came up for me searching for "dconf".

sleekmason · 2025-10-26 11:04:53

@johnraff

https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic … 11#p145811

@hhh wrote:
Some apps like pavucontrol (libadwaita apps, I'm guessing) are not themed properly. Install dconf-editor and, for the default theme (bunsen-yaru-bark-dark) set org>gnome>desktop>interface>color-scheme to 'prefer-dark" and interface>gtk-theme to 'bunsen-yaru-bark-dark' and Apply.

This may work with just the 'prefer-dark' setting ... I am not sure, but it seemed to still only grab the Adwaita theme, which would probably work out fine color wise. I've only tested on my own system for this one. If it actually picks up the Yaru theme, then all the better. Seems a decent solution overall if it serves.

johnraff · 2025-10-27 04:44:19

^I set both color-scheme to 'prefer-dark' and gtk-theme to 'bunsen-yaru-bark-dark' but file-roller and transmission are still white. I couldn't find a dconf-editor "apply" button though.

You, hhh and darknetmatrix all seem to get results with this - any idea what I might be doing wrong?

johnraff · 2025-10-27 05:10:24

What I did stumble on, though, was:

GTK_THEME='bunsen-yaru-bark-dark' file-roller

and

GTK_THEME='bunsen-yaru-bark-dark' transmission-gtk

worked!

So something ought to be doable.

I also tried copying ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini into ~/.config/gtk-4.0/
It was clearly reading the file because I got warnings about "unknown key" for gtk-toolbar-style, gtk-toolbar-icon-size, gtk-button-images and gtk-menu-images "in /home/john/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini", but with or without those entries the file seemed to make no difference. The GTK_THEME variable did though.

BTW our bunsen-yaru themes do have gtk-4.0 directories with content, so GTK-4 apps ought to use it, no?

EDIT: it gets more confusing.
Now, with ~/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini containing:

[Settings]
gtk-theme-name=bunsen-yaru-bark-dark
gtk-icon-theme-name=labbe-icons-bark
gtk-font-name=Sans 10
gtk-cursor-theme-name=DMZ-White
gtk-cursor-theme-size=0
gtk-enable-event-sounds=0
gtk-enable-input-feedback-sounds=0
gtk-xft-antialias=1
gtk-xft-hinting=1
gtk-xft-hintstyle=hintslight
gtk-xft-rgba=rgb

transmission-gtk and pavucontrol come up nicely themed, but file-roller is still white.
Without that gtk-4.0/settings.ini they all come up white.

But file-roller still responds to

GTK_THEME='bunsen-yaru-bark-dark' file-roller

Last edited by johnraff (2025-10-27 05:32:38)

hhh · 2025-10-27 05:18:33

Try setting the dconf-editor window to maximize or full-screen, the "Apply" button should appear lower-right.

johnraff · 2025-10-27 05:44:11

No hint of an Apply button:

But those two previous settings do seem to have "taken" somehow - they now appear in the interface without opening up the key.

But file-roller is still stubbornly white (except with that envvar), while transmission-gtk and pavucontrol (any other gtk4 apps we use?) are nicely dark.

Discussion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comm … tk4_theme/
and
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GTK#GTK_3_and_GTK4

PS I guess if all the other GTK4 apps turn out to be co-operative, then swapping out file-roller for engrampa would be an option...

Last edited by johnraff (2025-10-27 06:04:36)

johnraff · 2025-10-27 06:42:54

sleekmason wrote:

Okay, so just consolidating the already present information into a smaller format as a possibility. The length didn't change much in the end.

No... I think it can still be squeezed down some more, taking out a few unnecessary words here an there. But thanks for your work.

                           <big><b>Welcome to BunsenLabs Live!</b></big>

The Live operating system lets you test BunsenLabs without needing
to make changes to your computer's hard drive.

This live session can also be used for system recovery, or other tasks
like checking on hardware compatibility for your keyboard, monitor,
and network connections.

Keyboard shortcuts are listed on the desktop for all of the programs
most frequently used in Bunsenlabs. Note that the 'super' key is also
the same as the 'windows' key on your keyboard.

Changing your keyboard layout is easy if required. in a terminal, use:
'<b>setxkbmap xx</b>', where 'xx' is the country code for your layout.
See '/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.lst' for a full list.

For this live session, your username is '<b>user</b>' and your root password
is '<b>live</b>'. You already have sudo permissions.

To install Bunsenlabs, please reboot this ISO and use: 'Start installer'
or choose 'Advanced install' for further control.

				    Thank you for trying <b>BunsenLabs Linux</b>!

I don't know what's wrong with postimg today, the full-sized images don't display. I got the same earlier with an @unklar post.

the line to use for the VM warning would have to be something simple like:
Using Bunsenlabs in a Virtual Environment may require the disabling
of the compositor to function correctly.
And possibly share where a button is..?

We can just put the button at the bottom of the dialog, along with "OK".

when I booted earlier in a VM, I noticed the line said 'debian' instead of Bunsenlabs', however, I could have sworn it said Bunsenlabs the second time.

Let me guess... "the line" meant the top entry of the grub boot window? If so, there's a mysterious bug here I have yet to look into. The package bunsen-os-release should run 'update-grub' post-install and update the grub menu. But it's running at the end of the debian-installer so something is interfering. I'll have a look at the install log. Just running 'sudo update-grub' fixes it, but that's not good enough.

johnraff · 2025-10-27 07:53:48

sleekmason wrote:

conky is hard to see...

Discussion here: https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=9577

sleekmason · 2025-10-27 11:55:49

johnraff wrote:
Let me guess... "the line" meant the top entry of the grub boot window?

Yes. Of interest is that while I updated, I do not believe I installed anything that would have updated grub... Oh boy. I'm doing a reinstall and testing further.

I saw no issues with the os-release file. Are you placing it in /etc? or /usr/lib for the build?

I noted I had changed from /usr/lib to /etc for the file placement due to some non-specific issue or another. I did not notate the change as such, so not sure exactly why. Could be it wasn't getting read properly from /usr/lib.

#61 2025-10-23 08:08:13

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#62 2025-10-24 00:14:19

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#63 2025-10-24 05:14:12

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#64 2025-10-25 05:48:00

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#65 2025-10-25 05:51:44

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#66 2025-10-25 09:06:27

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#67 2025-10-25 14:41:02

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#68 2025-10-25 19:30:55

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#69 2025-10-25 20:06:40

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#70 2025-10-25 22:27:58

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#71 2025-10-26 09:41:35

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#72 2025-10-26 09:46:22

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#73 2025-10-26 11:04:53

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#74 2025-10-27 04:44:19

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#75 2025-10-27 05:10:24

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#76 2025-10-27 05:18:33

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#77 2025-10-27 05:44:11

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#78 2025-10-27 06:42:54

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#79 2025-10-27 07:53:48

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

#80 2025-10-27 11:55:49

Re: Carbon alpha iso available for testing

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