problem with dialog boxes in lower resolutions
Posted: Thu 11 Jun 2009, 10:23
i'm not sure if this belongs in here, so feel free to delete it. i've been using puppy woof alpha 8 (i can't find alpha 9), and a long standing problem resurfaced (copied from my post in the beginners forum... apologies for the ranty tone: it was very late )
i don't know if this is really the sort of thing to go in this thread - or even whether it is a problem with puppy, xorg, or jwm - but one thing that really bugs me about puppy is that despite being 'marketed' to people with old machines, it assumes a high resolution display.
my laptop runs at 1024x768, but a lot of dialog boxes are far too big to fit on the screen. this means i can't read what is at the bottom of the window or, for example, what the button options are. the box can't be resized, and maximising it simply widens the little bit i can read. the only way out is to hit Enter and hope that the button i have just selected is the right one. it happened to me just now when i tried to install the java-jdk.
in an otherwise great OS, it is incredibly frustrating!
EDIT: and it's just happened again. seeing as i've spent the best part of 5 hours downloading packages for some university work, the fact that there might be huge dependency problems simply because i couldn't read the bottom of a dialog box or see a button saying "fix this!" is so utterly depressing it's almost funny. i note there is an option in the menu to check dependencies. however, i can't use this as, guess what? the list in the box disappears off the bottom of the screen and is not scrollable or resizable. joy!
is something like this really so hard to fix? i doubt puppy will be a viable alternative to windows until it discovers scroll bars!
i don't know if this is really the sort of thing to go in this thread - or even whether it is a problem with puppy, xorg, or jwm - but one thing that really bugs me about puppy is that despite being 'marketed' to people with old machines, it assumes a high resolution display.
my laptop runs at 1024x768, but a lot of dialog boxes are far too big to fit on the screen. this means i can't read what is at the bottom of the window or, for example, what the button options are. the box can't be resized, and maximising it simply widens the little bit i can read. the only way out is to hit Enter and hope that the button i have just selected is the right one. it happened to me just now when i tried to install the java-jdk.
in an otherwise great OS, it is incredibly frustrating!
EDIT: and it's just happened again. seeing as i've spent the best part of 5 hours downloading packages for some university work, the fact that there might be huge dependency problems simply because i couldn't read the bottom of a dialog box or see a button saying "fix this!" is so utterly depressing it's almost funny. i note there is an option in the menu to check dependencies. however, i can't use this as, guess what? the list in the box disappears off the bottom of the screen and is not scrollable or resizable. joy!
is something like this really so hard to fix? i doubt puppy will be a viable alternative to windows until it discovers scroll bars!