10.22.2008

Some more tricks on the desktop of my Eee PC

So I had recognised already in the first days of using my Eee PC 901, that the desktop is composed from KDE programs. Using the Ctrl+Alt+T and the xterm I can start a lot of preinstalled KDE 3 programs. Because of that I thought that it is a real KDE desktop customized by Asus. I am somewhat familiar with KDE since I use it on all my other computers. I started to streamlined the desktop of my Eee PC to make it more familiar. First I have started kconrol, the KDE Control Center. In that I was able to setup the necessary keyboard layouts (Finnish and Hungarian, since I use both in my work) and also some keyboard shortcuts. I was satisfied with this, but when I logged in next time, I have noticed that my settings were disappeared. Today I was hunting for the solution. It turned out, the the desktop is in reality IceWM, so I have created the /home/use/.icewm directory to contain my personalized config files. I have just copied the system wide configs, because mostly I am happy with them:

mkdir /home/use/.icewm
cp /etc/X11/icewm/* /home/use/.icewm

I wanted to start the keyboard layout handler program and the shortcut handler program when starting the desktop, so I have created the custom startup script for icewm: /home/use/.icewm/startup. The content of the file:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/kxkb # KDE keyboard layou handler
/usr/bin/khotkeys # KDE hotkeys handler

Of course, I have made it executble with chmod +x /home/use/.icewm/startup
I turned out, that it does not work as such. The icewm config files are used there, for example I can make the start menu visible by setting the value 1 for TaskBarShowStartMenu in the file /home/use/.icewm/preferences. But the startup script was not executed. I have googled around and have found out, that this is because in the initialisation script: /usr/bin/startsimple.sh icewm is started an inproper way. edited the file as root (sudo -i) and replaced the line
exec icewm
to
exec icewm-session
as recommended in the documentation of icewm, and voilas, everything works like a dream!

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