How to use Tableware in a modern linux distro?

[ViktorNova]

Hello! I just stumbled on all of your work with xPUD and I am seriously impressed!

Specifically with Tableware. I am sad the project is no more, but I would love to build Tableware and possibly expand on it. I am working on Debian Wheezy

I managed to build tableware-webkit from the archives directory, but when I run it, it says

Unable to load page

Problem occurred while loading the URL http://localhost/usr/share/plate/chrome/content

Cannot connect to destination (localhost)

I am unsure how to properly use it, as there is no documentation I could find. Still working on building tableware-wm. Do you have any advice?

Also, do you have any working download links of this in action? I found many links to xPUD 0.9.5 but none of them work. I find the idea of a web-based desktop with X11 apps baked into the page with css and jquery transitions to be absolutely fascinating and would love to explore this more. Thank you!

[joshas]

You should check out SlateKit http://penkia.blogspot.com/

[ViktorNova]

I actually checked out the VM of it yesterday, very cool stuff! Very smooth and nice feeling.

I was under the impression that SlateKit is a QT widget set & web browser that runs outside of X and does not have the ability to embed an X window inside of a webpage, the way TableWare and Slate UI/xPUD do. Is this not the case?

[joshas]

Looks like that SlateKit is intended to be browser only. You should contact penk for details, I'm not following that project.

[ViktorNova]

@penk I was very impressed by the SlateKit demos, do you have any guides of how to use it?

Edit: I just found a working download of xPud 0.9.5 on the Wayback Machine and can't wait to try it out, but would love any pointers you can offer for getting it compiled and running with modern components!

[penk]

Hi @ViktorNova, thanks for this discussion thread, sorry I haven't caught up till now.

SlateKit has a Qt 5.x dependency, if you have that installed on your system, just

git clone https://github.com/penk/SlateKit

And launch the UI with qmlscene, for example qmlscene SlateKit/Shell/qml/Shell.qml will start the browser. If you're looking for Oxide/armhf port, checkout the oxide branch.

[ViktorNova]

@penk - Thank you for responding! I apologize for being in a such a hurry when I made my last post, I accidentally typed SlateKit, but I was meaning to ask you about TableWare, your webkit-based Window Manager

[penk]

In that case, you'll need:

• Xorg, since you'll need XEmbed and reparent
• tableware browser, or a old enough web browser with NPAPI support (latest Chrome blocked it and Firefox disabled it by default)
• tableware plugin to embed application window
• tableware wm to map the wm event to plugin

Basically you'll need to follow the recipe for a file list. If I may ask, since TableWare and xPUD hasn't been updated for a while, what kind of solution you're looking for?

[ViktorNova]

I am basically trying to wrap a handful of linux apps into a single page app-style interface, and make them all feel like pieces of the same program, rather than separate apps. I am making a Linux distribution for live audio performance and need to have complete control over the user interface (so that it doesn't ever feel like a desktop os, but rather a kiosk for a particular purpose)

I considered using PyQt with XEmbed to wrap a few apps into one, but I am WAY better at web things and scripting than I am at actual programming, so your projects with xPUD are particularly interesting to me - especially in your demos where you used JQuery to flip X windows in a coverflow-type way - I want to build on that idea

Thanks for those instructions! Once I got it compiled, how do I get started with designing the WM interface? I'm assuming there's a giant html page somewhere that defines how and where on the 'page' different X windows will show up, along with the other UI elements like page navigation - or something like that? I'm unsure where to go next, but if you point me in the right direction I will totally figure it out

Can you offer any other advice? Thanks again, I appreciate you taking the time to tell me about this project, as I know it's been inactive for quite some time

[penk]

The html is located at https://github.com/penk/mkxpud/blob/master/skeleton/overwrite/usr/share/plate/chrome/content/index.html

Is your project also open source? Maybe I can help. If I'm going to implement xPUD with modern technologies these days I'd go with QML (with a similar syntax like CSS/JS) and QX11EmbedWidget.

Here's an example you can try: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1102658/qx11embedwidget-and-qx11embedcontainer

Also here's a real life production-level usage: https://code.launchpad.net/~mardy/signon-ui/xembed-dep

[ViktorNova]

Yes, my project is very much be open source, although there have been no releases yet. It's called StagecraftOS and I even have a site up (though at the moment it's mostly just a skeleton http://stagecraftos.com/) Right no

I'm developing on Debian Wheezy, and the first iso will most likely be based on dCore, the Debian-compatible version of Tiny Core Linux (although I would definitely consider a modern xPUD as a base if it existed, as it is also extremely light and runs in ram :) Is making a new xPUD something you have considered? A modern version would be very cool, I can see a lot of uses for it

Thank you very much for those links, I will spend some time checking those out when I get a chance in a few days. That is great that you may be able to help!

I haven't settled on what makes the most sense for this project, whether it's scripting an existing window manager (which is how it works now, with i3) or doing something like Tableware, or some combination, where some apps are bundled together into 'one' with XEmbed, and the rest is done through the window manager