First 0.25.0 Alpha build w/ Vista support

[ilmcuts]

Hey all,

There's a new "nightly" build on lsdev.org. This is special because it's
the first proper build with Vista support. Also included are fixes for
64-Bit Windows (XP and Vista). Get it here:

http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php?id=lsdev:downloads

It's the 2009-01-08 build. The version is "0.25.0 Alpha" - it's not a
0.24.8 build but experimental code! In fact, it's the latest, greatest,
cutting edge code from our CVS repository. :)

There are a couple of known bugs, as you can see here:
http://www.lsdev.org/bugs/view.php?id=42

Even though it doesn't, for example, run all 64-Bit startup apps, it's
still far more usable on 64-Bit Windows than our previous builds. That's
our hope, anyway. :)

Let us know if there's anything wrong with it (and I assume there will
be lots).

All the best,
-ilmcuts


PS. 0.24.8 will still be released, despite the 0.25.0 build. We're
working towards a final release of 0.24.8. It won't include Vista or x64
support but it'll deserve the label "stable build".

PPS. Feel free to compile and post nightlies on your own. If you're
having difficulties getting the code to compile, contact us.

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[Piotr Borys]

Oh man.... that's a fantastic news :) Finally LS on my notebook, too
- thus all my 3 machines will be running LS :D

Are there any other interesting new things in this experimental code?
I mean, is it worth of checking on my XP machine?

cheers and thanks!

[chris]

Post by Piotr Borys
Oh man.... that's a fantastic news :) Finally LS on my notebook, too
- thus all my 3 machines will be running LS :D
Are there any other interesting new things in this experimental code?
I mean, is it worth of checking on my XP machine?
cheers and thanks!

Just what you see in the readme.txt changes. The only main difference
you'll see on XP vs running the latest 0.24.8 RC is that this
experimental build plays various sounds the shell is responsible for.

chris


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[Paradox]

Very nice to see a new build! Lack of LS support was one of the major
things that was holding me back from moving to Vista (I refuse to use
explorer shell on my personal PC. It's bad enough putting up with it at
work). I've only been running it for a few days, but it seems pretty
solid so far, for an alpha. Module hiding appears to work better (no
more flickering in Fallout 3, I used to have to manually toggle all my
bars off). I am noticing one issue, and that is that all the startup
items in the two "startup" folders in the start menu are not being run
at all (I'm on XP, SP3). Is this a known issue?

Post by chris

Post by Piotr Borys
Oh man.... that's a fantastic news :) Finally LS on my notebook, too
- thus all my 3 machines will be running LS :D
Are there any other interesting new things in this experimental code?
I mean, is it worth of checking on my XP machine?
cheers and thanks!

Just what you see in the readme.txt changes. The only main difference
you'll see on XP vs running the latest 0.24.8 RC is that this
experimental build plays various sounds the shell is responsible for.
chris
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[ilmcuts]

Post by Paradox
Very nice to see a new build! Lack of LS support was one of the major
things that was holding me back from moving to Vista (I refuse to use
explorer shell on my personal PC. It's bad enough putting up with it at
work). I've only been running it for a few days, but it seems pretty
solid so far, for an alpha. Module hiding appears to work better (no
more flickering in Fallout 3, I used to have to manually toggle all my
bars off). I am noticing one issue, and that is that all the startup
items in the two "startup" folders in the start menu are not being run
at all (I'm on XP, SP3). Is this a known issue?

It's good to hear that module hiding works better. It should improve
even more once 0.24.8 is out as the fullscreen app detection was worked
on in the 0.24.8 branch and we haven't merged those changes yet.

As for the startup folders issue, that's new and definitely a bug. It
wasn't know when we posted the build but I too noticed it last night...
turns out I messed up when I changed a helper function. :\ A fix is
already in CVS, to be included in the next nightly.

-ilmcuts

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[ilmcuts]

Post by ilmcuts
As for the startup folders issue, that's new and definitely a bug. It
wasn't know when we posted the build but I too noticed it last night...
turns out I messed up when I changed a helper function. :\ A fix is
already in CVS, to be included in the next nightly.

Said next nightly has now been posted:
http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php?id=lsdev:downloads#cvs_experimental_binaries

Changes include:
- Fixed LS skipping startup folders
- Added "module" column to !about bangs
- Fixed copyright date in !about license
- Removed lsapi.dll from !about revision IDs
- Added new enumeration type ELD_BANGS_V2 to EnumLSData
- Added missing changelog entries

A more complete changelog is included in the zip.

Keep up the bug reports!

-ilmcuts

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[Tim Bates]

Not sure if it's been mentioned yet, but the build seems to work without
any issues on Windows 7 32 bit.
I'll be doing some testing of Win7 64 bit later today/tomorrow. This
will definitely include testing Litestep...

TB

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[Arve Barsnes]

Not sure if it's been mentioned yet, but the build seems to work without any
issues on Windows 7 32 bit.
I'll be doing some testing of Win7 64 bit later today/tomorrow. This will
definitely include testing Litestep...
TB

That's good news for LS :)

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[Björn Brembs]

Post by Arve Barsnes
That's good news for LS :)

Jus downloaded Windows 7. I'll let you know what I find.
Awesome!

All hail the DevTeam!

Bjoern
--
Björn Brembs
---------------------------------------------
http://brembs.net
Neurobiology
Freie Universität Berlin
Germany


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[Tim Bates]

Post by Tim Bates
I'll be doing some testing of Win7 64 bit later today/tomorrow. This
will definitely include testing Litestep...

Well I finally got to testing it... Works pretty good once you disable UAC.
Some themes (well, probably modules) cause LS to crash, and some modules
don't draw correctly. But find a theme that works, and it all works very
nicely. Other than those 2 issues though, it worked great.

Part of the not drawing correctly problem is that the new desktop
wallpaper slideshow thing fails to be of any use (at least when running
any themes I tried). No theme I tried rendered the changed wallpapers,
although most would update the text part of any icon that was clicked on
if the wallpaper had changed. Not a real big deal I guess, but was one
thing I noticed pretty quickly.

TB

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[ilmcuts]

Post by Tim Bates

Post by Tim Bates
I'll be doing some testing of Win7 64 bit later today/tomorrow. This
will definitely include testing Litestep...

Well I finally got to testing it... Works pretty good once you disable UAC.
Some themes (well, probably modules) cause LS to crash, and some modules
don't draw correctly. But find a theme that works, and it all works very
nicely. Other than those 2 issues though, it worked great.

The 0.25.0 builds no longer try to cover up module crashes. That's the
only way to track down those buggy modules. They need to be fixed.
Report crashes to the author or a mailing list (this one or lsdev) -
hopefully that will lead to some work being done on them.

-ilmcuts

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[Björn Brembs]

Post by Tim Bates
Not sure if it's been mentioned yet, but the build seems to work without
any issues on Windows 7 32 bit.

I've been running win7 32 now for quite a few days on my
laptop. In principle, it is running very well. I only
noticed a few things.
WLAN, sound and battery icons work (display), but are
unresponsive to clicks.
When the Popup for the control panel is set to browse,
clicking on the items doesn't work, but when it's set to
open the control panel in a folder, it works just dandy and
opens the control panel with all the controls.
Recycler (module) doesn't show up at all, have to use
explorer to empty recycler.

Other than that, so far, it seems to run great!

Thanks a lot for the awesome work!

Bjoern
--
Björn Brembs
---------------------------------------------
http://brembs.net
Neurobiology
Freie Universität Berlin
Germany


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[ilmcuts]

Post by Björn Brembs

Post by Tim Bates
Not sure if it's been mentioned yet, but the build seems to work without
any issues on Windows 7 32 bit.

I've been running win7 32 now for quite a few days on my
laptop. In principle, it is running very well. I only
noticed a few things.
WLAN, sound and battery icons work (display), but are
unresponsive to clicks.

Unfortunately there's nothing the LiteStep core can do about this (save
for a dirty hack). Systray modules are responsible for handling mouse
clicks and thus need to be updated. :\

Post by Björn Brembs
When the Popup for the control panel is set to browse,
clicking on the items doesn't work, but when it's set to
open the control panel in a folder, it works just dandy and
opens the control panel with all the controls.
Recycler (module) doesn't show up at all, have to use
explorer to empty recycler.

These too sound like module-side issues.

I wish there was more we could do core-side, but we can't reach into
module code. :\

-ilmcuts

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