AmigaOS 3.2 icon degrade?

[Overmann]

Hi,


I recently installed 3.2 on my A3000 with the new icons, however the machine is too slow to handle them and I've been trying to go back to the 4col icons. I seem to recall there was a utility bundled with 3.1.4 that did it but I can't find such a utility with 3.2.


Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I should go about installing 4 color icons?

[PeterK]

That utility for swapping the icon sets was included in BestWB for 3.1.4, but it will probably not help you to get your 4-color icons back on 3.2.

Did you already try out my icon.library on OS 3.2 for more speed? You would need the TC020 version as a replacement for Libs:icon.library.

http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/IconLib_46.4

In case that you use a native Amiga screen and the icon speed is still not fast enough, try to set the icon image quality to "Bad" in the Workbench preferences, which should give another little speed boost. For a better balanced color palette you could install FullPalette, by calling FPPrefs after IPrefs and copying one of my 16-color FullPalette.prefs files without the name extension into Envarc:Sys (see ThrirdParty/FullPalette)

[slaapliedje]

Originally Posted by PeterK

That utility for swapping the icon sets was included in BestWB for 3.1.4, but it will probably not help you to get your 4-color icons back on 3.2.

Did you already try out my icon.library on OS 3.2 for more speed? You would need the TC020 version as a replacement for Libs:icon.library.

http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/IconLib_46.4

In case that you use a native Amiga screen and the icon speed is still not fast enough, try to set the icon image quality to "Bad" in the Workbench preferences, which should give another little speed boost. For a better balanced color palette you could install FullPalette, by calling FPPrefs after IPrefs and copying one of my 16-color FullPalette.prefs files without the name extension into Envarc:Sys (see ThrirdParty/FullPalette)

This post reminded me that I needed your icon.library for my 'After Setup' CD that I'm making. Curious about why it isn't the one included on the 3.2 disks, as it seems to be way better than the standard one.

[PeterK]

Originally Posted by slaapliedje

Curious about why it isn't the one included on the 3.2 disks, as it seems to be way better than the standard one.

Oh no, then Hyperion could earn money with it.

[slaapliedje]

Originally Posted by PeterK

Oh no, then Hyperion could earn money with it.

Ha ha! Completely understandable! Still baffles my mind how the AmigaOS hasn't just gone full on open source. Sure I understand the 'why' it doesn't, but if more people managed to pursue that lofty goal, I think the community would benefit. We already have non-paid work on it, the only change would be the actual distribution of it. Settling on 'cost of eeprom flashing and shipping, with a bit of profit' for the physical kickstarts (or someone comes up with flashable kickstarts) and then grow the community around such an endeavor.

But hey, once can dream, right??

[alexh]

A 16MHz A3000 should be able to handle new icons without too much trouble and a 25MHz one should be fine. You sure you don't have another problem?

[Predseda]

I installed 3.2 yesterday and I am also not satisfied with the new icon set (they are giant on 640x256), but wait - there is not a way to remove them and keep the default ones? I am sure there is the option during installation where you tick if and which icon set you want. I am sure i got 4cols old icons first and installed the new ones additionaly. Degrading to default may mean reinstalation of the whole WB, though.

[ugrnm]

Small necrobump, have any of you found a way to have the basic icons back without reinstalling everything?

[AMIGASYSTEM]

You can collect all the icons with their respective paths, done that with Dopus4 you can overwrite all the icons.

Also you could create a small installer and from Workbench with one click replace all icons.

I did this on my AROS One Distribution where I created 4 Icon Sets (a thousand icons), where with one click you replace all the icons of the system in a few seconds, you can see what I said in this video of mine (minute 3.26)


[ Show youtube player ]

[mfilos]

@AMIGASYSTEM
This is a really nice solution for a newly installed system (for checking out iconsets in it's entirety).
If you start installing apps, changing tooltypes or cleaning up/snapshoting windows and icons into different positions, this procedure will quickly start messing things up.

@ugrnm
As AMIGASYSTEM said, copying the original ones from disks is the first solution and also making a stock 3.2.2 installa in WinUAE and getting via Dopus all icons (.info files only) from the installation and replacing them on the target system.
If you don't have many things installed, a reinstallation is way faster though :P

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by mfilos

@AMIGASYSTEM
This is a really nice solution for a newly installed system (for checking out iconsets in it's entirety).
If you start installing apps, changing tooltypes or cleaning up/snapshoting windows and icons into different positions, this procedure will quickly start messing things up.

Yes but it's not my case, every change icons, Tooltype, I constantly update the 4 Sets and Installers, sure it's hard work, but if you update every change time by time it's not tiring.

About the position difference, this is not a problem, on AROS there is an "automatic positioning" option.

The creation of the installer, on Aminet there is "InstallerGen", a simple and multilingual app to create archives to install, on aminet there are also other localizations.


http://aminet.net/package/util/misc/InstallerGen

[ugrnm]

Thanks both (and for the link to the installer script creation tool!).

So if I understand correctly, there are no location where all the icons are in the install disks or in an installed system? It's just that each file that has an icon, comes with their own default info file at the very location of the file on the install disks, and these are just extracted to their final destination during an installation? And that's why the only way to recover these original info files is to either reinstall or somehow collect them individually in one way or another and proceed with a system wide overwrite with the appropriate paths?

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Each Icon keeps the location, folder icons for example store location and window size.

If you do an OS 3.2 installation, and then back up the icons (without the folders and without the binary or data threads), and place them in the same location, all icon locations should place as they originally did.

In any case, you can always place and save the locations after replacing the Icons.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by ugrnm

So if I understand correctly, there are no location where all the icons are in the install disks or in an installed system? It's just that each file that has an icon, comes with their own default info file at the very location of the file on the install disks, and these are just extracted to their final destination during an installation? And that's why the only way to recover these original info files is to either reinstall or somehow collect them individually in one way or another and proceed with a system wide overwrite with the appropriate paths?

Yeah, pretty much.

And since the icons also store snapshot position info and the tooltypes may have been edited since installation, it would be a good idea to use some kind of command line tool (processicon from aminet) that only replaces the icon image data and leaves everything else alone when installing. A filecopy is not elegant. ;-)

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Jope you are talking about replacing all the icons in the system, besides the fact that there are so many of them, the icons are scattered in so many directories, editing them all with processicon and automatically "copying" them to the various paths is not a simple operation.

Actually if the user has to "just replace the icons" and has not made any major changes on the icons, he should not worry about this problem.

[ugrnm]

Thanks all for the extra info, I think I understand a bit better how to handle icons. I ended up by first extracting all the info files from the install and update disks, for instance (Linux):

unadf install3.2.adf -d info_files-3.2.2
...
unadf Update3.2.2.adf -d info_files-3.2.2

Then delete everything but the info files, and removing the empty directories.

cd info_files-3.2.2
find . -type f ! -name '*.info' -delete
find . -empty -type d -delete

I zipped it all and transferred to the Amiga

7z a -tzip info_files-3.2.2.zip info_files-3.2.2
squirt 192.168.1.whatever info_files-3.2.2.zip

Now I have an archive + path of the default info files, and I cherry picked from it what I needed to recover.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

I think you got it wrong, consider that folders and Binary have the same name, so which of them did you retrieve ?

To do a perfect job create all the operating system folders, each in its own path, then you simply copy "just the icons" to their respective paths.

The folders are not needed, but they are needed to keep the icon paths, let's say the folders are dummy, when you copy only the icons will be copied.

[ugrnm]

See attached txt file that's the folder generated from the commands I posted. As you can see I'm collecting all the info file in their original location, so that I can use this folder both as a reference for the paths and an archive of the original info files in case I need to recover some/all of them.

But maybe I misunderstand your remark?

It did solve my problem though, I could restore some info files like this!