Version 0.9.2, August 2009
ClockFlit is an applet 'tray', currently offering clock, master sound volume control, and battery monitor. It is written to be small and low-overhead, using the FLTK user interface library, so it is especially efficient on TinyCore Linux. The source code of Flit is released under the GNU license. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for more details.
There is a menu of choices made available through right-clicking on Flit, or pressing the Esc key after setting keyboard focus to Flit. The sound control applet has several keyboard shortcuts (see below).
If you don't want to see all three applets, you can disable one or two of them in the right-click menu, but not all three!
'Hover' your mouse pointer over each applet to get more detailed information. The battery recharge time estimate is very approximate in this release. (I hope to improve the algorithm soon!)
If you want to start Flit automatically, invoke it in the .xsession
(or equivalent) startup script file, using a & symbol to return control
immediately to the script, like this:
/path/to/flit &
The only option for the clock is 24-hour time format, or 12-hour format with AM or PM indication. Use the right-click menu to toggle between these modes.
The current sound volume level is indicated by the number and size of the
sound "rays" next to the speaker icon. To adjust the volume, place your mouse
cursor over the speaker and use the mouse scroll wheel (or equivalent) to adjust
the sound volume in 5% increments. You may also use the following keystrokes:
Louder: Menu + Alt+U, or Up arrow cursor key, or + key
Quieter: Menu + Alt+L, or Down arrow cursor key, or - key
Mute/Unmute: Menu + Alt+M, or Pause key
Future versions may also provide a pop-up slider control.
The sound control requires an OSS "mixer" device '/dev/mixer' to be present.
There is a lot of variation in how sound devices can be controlled, but Flit
will try to support some common methods. By default, Flit will try to find
an appropriate mixer control to adjust the overall playback volume. You can
override this behavior by specifying an exact OSS mixer control name in the
.flit.conf file, in the "oss_control_name =" statement. If the name is
"autosel", Flit will do the default auto-selection. But if you know that
you get best results from a specific mixer control, such as "vol" or "pcm"
or something else, put it name into the .flit.conf file, such as:
oss_control_name = pcm
If flit is not successful in finding a suitable control (which must be marked
with the MASTER_VOLUME or PCM_VOLUME in OSS), you won't see the sound control
applet in Flit. You may want to try the graphical mixer application ossxmix
(note the X in the name) or command-line application ossmix and experiment
with the controls made available for your hardware to see which ones can
control the volume. If OSS + your hardware don't support an adjustable output
volume, you may still be able to use a mute control with Flit.
LIMITATIONS: The OSS vmix software mixer control will only work if vmix is fully "attached" to your audio hardware (beyond the scope of this document). ALSA is not supported (at least not yet, anyway).
In the battery icon, charge is colored green if the level is 40% or higher, yellow when 20% or higher, and red below 20%. If the estimated charge Is less than 13%, the outline of the battery icon will slowly flash red. When recharging power is available, an AC power plug icon is shown over the battery icon. If the battry is discharging, the remaining charge percentage number is shown above the battery icon.
The battery monitor requires information in the /proc/acpi system information, so you must boot Linux with the 'laptop' kernel option or load the appropriate ACPI kernel module.
You may reposition Flit with your mouse (left-click + drag), or hand-edit the .flit.conf configuration file (see cautions below). The location can be defined to one of the four corners (se = SouthEast, i.e. the lower-right corner, and so on) or a x,y pair. See the configuration file for an example.
Post bug reports and suggestions to the TinyCore Linux Forum (http://tinycorelinux.com/forum/).
Michael A. Losh