1.27.0: USB sticks set up in Disk Management, drives mounted from Explorer

Fixed

• Disk Management could not set up a new USB stick. Create Partition on a blank disk asked for a partition starting at sector 0, on top of the partition table, and sfdisk refused. Taking all the free space at the end of a GPT disk failed the same way, over the table's backup copy. Partitions now start on a mebibyte and, given all the space, let sfdisk size them.
• A blank disk is set up in one go. Create Partition on a disk with no partition table brings up Initialize Disk (MBR first for a stick or a card), then makes the partition, exFAT above 32 GB and FAT32 below on removable disks.
• Initialize Disk failed in silence when anything on the disk was mounted. It now unmounts the disk's volumes first, refuses a disk the system runs from, and reports what went wrong.
• Format retypes the partition to match its file system, so a stick formatted FAT32, exFAT or NTFS gets a drive letter on Windows. A new ext4, XFS or Btrfs volume belongs to you rather than root.
• The installer brings dosfstools, exfatprogs and the NTFS tools, without which Format offered no FAT32, exFAT or NTFS.

New

• Explorer mounts and unmounts drives. My Computer lists volumes that are not mounted as well as those that are; opening one mounts it. The right-click menu and the File menu have Mount, Unmount, and Eject for USB sticks, cards and discs: everything on the drive is unmounted and a stick is powered off, safe to remove. It goes through udisks, which the installer now brings: a stick mounts without a password, an internal disk asks for the administrator's.

  curl -sL jacktulli.github.io/w2k | sh

1.26.0: the audit's fixes, and the menu shadow effect withdrawn

A full audit of the tree, and the fixes it produced. docs/AUDIT.md has the third pass in detail: what was run, every bug, and every slow path.

Fixed, worst first

• Explorer acted on the wrong file whenever the Search box was in use. The list showed fewer rows than the entry array held, but Delete, Rename, Open and drop all indexed that array by row. Searching in a folder and pressing Delete offered to bin a different file.
• The logon screen, which runs as root before anyone logs on, opened the wallpaper and picture paths verbatim out of a user-writable file. Any user could have root render another user's or root's own files full-screen. A picture is now loaded only when it is a regular file, inside that user's home, owned by them, and not a symlink.
• Paint corrupted its heap after twelve edits: the undo ring left two slots naming one buffer and then freed it twice.
• The classic Start menu dropped the command you clicked if a Tab or a Ctrl-letter had been pressed first.
• Device Manager kept a device pointer across the rescan that frees them, so opening Properties and plugging in a USB stick read freed memory.
• Also: an unquoted rm -rf built from $HOME, a root-side stack overflow in Disk Management, a use-after-free when a window closes during a taskbar drag, the Windows 7 orb's overhang arithmetic and its dead click at 200%, Aero caption buttons that could never light under the pointer, three modal loops that could be left holding the pointer and keyboard, the tray orphaning its icons, two property leaks per event, silent edit-buffer failures that were written through anyway, a password left behind in freed heap, a search result that could launch a different program, and a dozen more.

Faster and lighter

• The volume level is subscribed to rather than polled: it used to fork a shell and two processes every five seconds for the life of the session.
• Smooth scrolling is driven by the timer instead of sleeping 21 ms inside the button handler.
• The pinned-items file is read when it changes, not on every taskbar repaint.
• Radio buttons, tree connectors and the Start menu's banner are batched instead of costing hundreds of X requests each; icons stop building artwork nothing draws at scales other than 100%; Aero's reflection and caption buttons are worked out once instead of per pixel and per repaint; Show Desktop settles once instead of per window.

Withdrawn

• Show shadows under menus. The effect was broken against every backdrop and worse under a compositor. The option is gone from Performance Options and the code with it; anything already saved for it is ignored.

  curl -sL jacktulli.github.io/w2k | sh

1.25.0: the logon screen's artwork, background and picture

New

• Logon Screen in Control Panel: choose the banner's artwork (Windows 2000, the Linux 2000 logo, or your distribution's own logo and name), the colour or a wallpaper behind the dialog, and whether the user's picture shows on it. The logon screen takes the look of the last user who logged on. logonui opens the applet.

Fixed

• Password boxes show stars (1.24.2).

  curl -sL jacktulli.github.io/w2k | sh

1.24.2: password boxes show stars

Fixed

• The logon screen drew the password in the clear. Password boxes now show a star for every character typed, with the caret and selection where they should be, in the logon screen and anywhere else a box is marked as a password.

Everything from 1.24.1 is included.

curl -sL jacktulli.github.io/w2k | sh

1.24.1: the classic menu's search keeps its size, banner and first letter

Fixed

• The classic Start menu's search now stands exactly where the menu stood, the same size, with the banner and its text, instead of a smaller panel with a bare gradient.
• A search beginning with a letter that is also a menu mnemonic (c for Sear&ch, p for &Programs, s for &Settings and the rest) lost that letter to the item; at the menu's top level a typed letter now goes to the search first.

Everything from 1.24.0 (search inside the Start menus, the Windows names, windows through Aero glass) is included.

curl -sL jacktulli.github.io/w2k | sh

1.24.0: search inside the Start menus, the Windows names, windows through Aero glass

New

• Search inside the Start menu. Typing at any Start menu searches in the menu itself, the first letter included. The Windows 7 panel gives its left column to the results and shows the text in its own search box (which can be clicked into); XP's does the same with a box at the top of its column; the classic menu is replaced where it stood by a panel in its style. Enter opens the selected result, Up and Down move, a click opens, Escape ends it. Searched: the programs, the recent documents, and the Windows names.

• The names Windows users type. taskmgr, winver, calc, notepad, mspaint, explorer, control, charmap, snippingtool, devmgmt.msc, diskmgmt.msc, desk.cpl, ncpa.cpl, timedate.cpl, mmsys.cpl, main.cpl, powercfg.cpl, wuapp, cmd and more run what they run on Windows, from Run and from the search, each with its icon.

• Show windows through Aero glass. An effect in Performance Options, off by default: with it on, the X Composite extension keeps each window's picture and Aero's glass is drawn from what is really stacked under it, not the wallpaper alone. Frames and the bar refresh when a window is raised or dropped after a drag.

  curl -sL jacktulli.github.io/w2k | sh

1.23.0: the real orb, Aero Start menu in the bar's glass, Windows 7 controls

New

• The real Windows 7 Start orb, all three states: at rest, lit with its glow as the pointer arrives (the quarter-second fade now mixes the genuine lit frame in), and pressed. Scaled so the sphere is the size the captures show, placed as measured: rising above the small bar, inside the big one.
• Windows 7 controls under the Vista and 7 looks, measured off Windows 7: rounded gradient push buttons (blue when pressed), tabs on white pages in the grey-lined strip, the two-tone menu bar with a pale blue box on the open item, flat single-line wells and status panes, pale group-box lines.

Aero

• The Start menu is the taskbar's glass, one piece with the bar, and opens behind the orb; the user's tile is Windows 7's own Aero frame with its transparency; Shut down and the lit row under the pointer are glass.
• Frames: the corner art is the arc's lines alone (no lighter corner squares); the lines round the client are gone; plain white titles; the caption buttons are clean, Close taken whole from the capture.
• The speaker on the Aero bar is the white Windows 7 glyph.

Fixed

• The desktop builds its wallpaper when first created, not only on a later reload.

  curl -sL jacktulli.github.io/w2k | sh

1.22.1: the Windows 7 orb stays above windows on the small bar

Fixed

• The Windows 7 Start orb was cut off at the top on the small taskbar. The orb is a window of its own that rises above the bar, and the stacking order rebuilt on every raise listed the bar but not the orb, so any window raised to the bar's top edge covered the part above it. The orb now stacks just over the bar, wherever the bar goes.

Everything from 1.22.0 (Windows 7 Aero, the pixel-measured Windows 7 taskbar and orb, the bundled Windows 7 wallpaper) is included.

curl -sL jacktulli.github.io/w2k | sh

1.22.0: Windows 7 Aero, the orb over the small bar, the Windows 7 wallpaper

New

• Windows 7 Aero. A sixth look in Display Properties > Appearance: 7's frames, taskbar and Start menu in glass. Without a compositor nothing can be seen through a window, so the glass is the wallpaper, kept blurred, coloured by a law measured off Windows 7 with the same window over black, white and blue desktops. Frames are eight pixels each side and thirty-six over the client, with the reflection down the caption's left and up to its right corner, rounded corners and the caption buttons cut from the captures (the inactive window's grey set included), and plain white titles. The taskbar is the bar's glass with its edge line and Show Desktop sliver, task buttons the measured white-over-glass profile; the Start menu a slab of dark glass with the white pane and the search band cut into it. Aero brings the Windows-7 GTK, Qt and icon themes like Basic does. A window behind another's frame is not seen through it; the wallpaper is what shows there.
• The Windows 7 wallpaper is carried in wallpapers/ and listed on the Background tab.
• Windows 7 taskbar, pixel for pixel, from full-size captures of the real thing: the orb in a window of its own that rises above the small bar and sits inside the big one, the task button gradient, the Show Desktop sliver, the tray's offsets from the right edge and its speaker and network glyphs.

Fixed

• The desktop only built its wallpaper on a reload (a scheme change, the monitors settling); a fresh session without one showed the desktop colour. It is built when the desktop is first created.

  curl -sL jacktulli.github.io/w2k | sh

1.21.0: Windows programs through Wine; Control Panel items open the right panes

New

• Windows programs, through Wine. Double-click an .exe, .msi, .lnk or .bat in Explorer and it opens with Wine's start: an installer installs, a program runs, a shortcut is followed. What gets installed appears in the Start menu under Programs > Windows Programs with its own icons, an .exe in Explorer shows the icon inside it (with icoutils), and the session makes Wine's prefix the first time it is missing. The installer brings wine and icoutils; 32-bit programs need the distribution's 32-bit Wine too.

Fixed

• Control Panel items from Folder Options down opened the next item's pane, or none: the double-click handler's index list had not been given the Disk Management row. Each row now names its own pane.

  curl -sL jacktulli.github.io/w2k | sh