Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix … not updated

I spent a few hours today wandering through my mess of notes and scripts from two months ago, in hopes of making some small updates and corrections to Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix. In the end though, I actually didn’t update it, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, I have had no luck finding an instant messenger or chat client that doesn’t require hefty rebuilding to use GTK1.2. I had a lead on Ayttm, which looks from the screenshots to be GTK1.2, but didn’t seem to have a way to build in the older toolkit short of recoding. Or at least, there wasn’t any option in ./configure --help, and beyond that I’m really not interested in prying.

So I abandoned that idea, because apparently the next step down from Ayttm (or Everybuddy, its predecessor, which isn’t around any more) is console-based, and there are better options for console based chatting that you can add to UGTK1.2R on your own. And don’t tell me you don’t have Internet access, so you can’t install irssi, and it needs to be available by default. Think about what you’re saying. … 🙄

Same goes for an FTP client; I tried to build both AxyFTP and GFTP with GTK1.2 bindings, but neither worked. AxyFTP was more promising than gFTP — it actually compiled, but every time I ran it, it went spinning wildly out of control, dying with a wicked cackle before melting into a puddle and segfaulting. Like the Wicked Witch of the West.

gFTP just didn’t like me, and wouldn’t compile even though I seemed to have everything it wanted, in place. The homepage insists it will work with GTK1.2, but none of the debs I downloaded from there would work without GTK2, and I tried them all. And my compilations … didn’t. But that’s okay if it didn’t like me; I never liked gFTP either, so there’s no love lost.

Aside from a chat client and an FTP program, the only other thing I’ve ever really wanted for UGTK1.2R was a proper CD burner. But again, I couldn’t find anything that hadn’t made the jump from GTK1.2 to GTK2, and still worked. Even xcdroast, which I always thought to be stranded in GTK1.2 la-la land, appears to be fully GTK2 now — or at least the default version in the Ubuntu repos is. Doesn’t matter, I suppose: The versions I got from the repositories couldn’t detect my CD burner anyway. So again, nothing lost there.

And the only other reasons I had for updating the ISO were to correct the hostname issue, and the shutdown/reboot problems. I also wanted to try and correct the installer script so it would build a different partition scheme, but that was becoming a bit troublesome. Mostly I worried that very small hard drives (like the one in my Fujitsu laptop) would be mis-partitioned under my new script, and I didn’t want to introduce problems that I couldn’t comfortably troubleshoot on my own.

So in the end, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort to rebuild and restest everything, over and over again. The two main issues that still stand — the hostname and sudoers file issues, and the rather wordy Grub menu — are more easily handled by end users, who can edit those files directly after installation. I don’t like leaving those problems as “unresolved,” but until a major update is necessary, correcting them at the source end is more work.

If you’ve used it, and you like it — or even if you don’t like it — let me know. I’ve had 250 downloads since I posted it in October, and I’m curious if it’s at all useful. I install it when I’m between systems, but my opinion is predictable. A mother loves her own child best, so to speak. 😉