[Fedora-livecd-list] liveusb-creator-gtk to be included on livecds

[Luke Macken]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 01:46:35PM +0200, مؤيد السعدي wrote:
> hi,
> as I said on the IRC, I'm going to make a pyGTK tool to install the livecd
> into a usb pendrive
> 
> I'm releasing it under GPLv2 to allow fedora shipping it with their rpms
> 
> What I have done so far is the GUI which automatically know source cds and
> target partitions from dbus (no refresh button as it sense the change)
> 
> all options and we can add more at any time as I made them a python dict
> 
> the header is a gtk.Label() surrounded by two icons
> the fedora/ojuba/gnome logo by using start-here icon name (to make branding
> easy)
> and drive-removable-media-usb icon name (from gnome icon theme)
> 
> I want to make sure that those icons are suitable for the KDE/XFCE/LXDE
> spins
> 
> I did not implement the real creation of the livecd yet, simply because I
> don't want to reinvent the wheel
> I guess that would be 10 lines to code after we split liveusb-creator into
> liveusb-creator and liveusb-creator-qt (and maybe adding
> liveusb-creator-cli)

I designed the liveusb creator in a way that makes it very easy to throw
any GUI on top of it.  I initially started writing a PyGTK gui, but
switched to PyQt because: 1) The implementation turned out to be much
cleaner and 2) It ran great out of the box on Windows.

The liveusb.creator module already does all of the hard work for you,
and wrapping a GUI around it is quite easy.  You can find the latest
liveusb-creator API documentation here:

    http://lmacken.fedorapeople.org/liveusb-creator/api/

Now, in order to be the 'default' liveusb-creator GUI, it needs to be
fully feature compliant (to the extent that the liveusb.creator module
currently is), and it needs to run on Windows.  If the GTK
implementation can meet those requirements, then I would be fine with
making it the default; assuming that the implementation is as
clean as the current, and is easily maintainable.

As far as GTK is concerned, the current liveusb-creator is actually
rendered with GTK widgets on a Fedora 10 GNOME desktop, thanks to
QGtkStyle.  So, I guess the only reason for creating a brand new
interface from scratch is to avoid the PyQt dependency on livecds?  That
doesn't exactly sounds like the best reason for re-implementing the
interface, but if someone is willing to write the code, I'm not
complaining ;)

Here are some prototypes of what the next major release of the
liveusb-creator will probably look like:

http://lmacken.fedorapeople.org/liveusb-creator/liveusb-creator-tabbed-0.png
http://lmacken.fedorapeople.org/liveusb-creator/liveusb-creator-tabbed-1.png
http://lmacken.fedorapeople.org/liveusb-creator/liveusb-creator-tabbed-2.png

Let me know if you have any questions, and please keep me in the loop on
the progress!  There is also a liveusb-creator mailing list where we can
discuss further implementation details.

Cheers,

luke