The Asus Eee comes with a dormant window manager called IceWM. (A window manager is a graphical user interface that controls placement and appearance of windows within an operating system). By simply editing a text file, one can gain access to a world of window and taskbar settings, and can also enable a Start Menu. This document will focus primarily on activating the Start Menu, but later on we will add how-to's for other settings.
It would be great if someone could assist me with a redirect from the old version of this page to this version. I believe this site has a necessary plugin and further details.
This will involve creating a folder in your /home/user directory and copying an existing preferences text file over to that new directory. This preferences file contains many, many interesting settings but for now we will simply focus on enabling the Start Menu.
1. Open your Terminal using the keyboard combination Ctrl-Alt-T.
2.1) Type the following commands, as shown in the screenshot below.
/home/user> mkdir ~/.icewm /home/user> cp /etc/X11/icewm/preferences /home/user/.icewm
3. Now, from here you can simply edit the file and be done with it if you happen to know how, but if you are new to using the command line you might wish to verify that the file was actually copied. Then, assuming you navigate to the new directory first as shown below, you would enter the command nano preferences.
/home/user> cd .icewm /home/user> ls /home/user> nano preferences
4. Now you should be looking at your newly copied IceWM preferences file in Nano.
5. Using the cursor key, navigate to the line containing “TaskBarShowStartMenu” and change the zero to a 1 as shown below.
6. Now you can hit the Ctrl-X key combination, press “Y” to save, then press <enter> to save the name as 'preferences'.
7. That's it! Now you can press the key combination Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X (restarting your Eee is unnecessary) and you will see a Start Menu.
1. Open the Work Tab
2. Open File Manager
3. Click “View”, “Show Hidden Files”
4. Click “View, “Show All File Systems”
5. In the left-hand pane, click “My Home” and create a hidden folder entitled .icewm
6. In the left-hand pane, navigate from “All File Systems” to /etc/X11/icewm
7. In the right-hand pane, click Ctrl-A to select all files
8. Click Ctrl-C to copy to the clipboard
9. In the left-hand pane, select My Home, .icewm and click Ctrl-V to paste from the clipboard
10. Right click on the file named “preferences” and choose “Open With…” → Text Editor.
11. Find the line “TaskBarShowStartMenu”, change the value from 0 to 1.
12. Save the file and press the key-combination Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X (restarting your Eee is unnecessary).
1. In the same preferences file discussed above, scroll down to the section titled “Clock Time Format” and look at the TimeFormat value as shown below.
2. Change the TimeFormat to read as follows
TimeFormat="%I:%M %p"
3. Now save your changes and restart X (or restart your Eee if you wish).
This article is under development.
File to edit is menu in /home/user/.icewm
# - anything after # in the line is comment
prog - is what will appear in your menu
separator - is line between groups
menu - group folder
restart - Restarting another window manager
menufile - special entry which house the shortcut names you placed in the toolbar
menuprog - ?
Some sample program entry :
format : prog “title” icon_name program_executable options
Games
prog "Potato Guy" ktuberling ktuberling -caption "Potato Guy"
Utility
prog "Control Panel" konqueror konqueror prog "File Manager" Icon XandrosFileManager prog "File Manager (Root)" Icon kdesu "XandrosFileManager --caption 'File Manager (ROOT)' --icon xfm_root" prog "Text Editor" kwrite kwrite prog "Screen Shot" ksnapshot ksnapshot prog "Remote Desktop" krdc krdc prog "Synaptic Package" synaptic kdesu synaptic
Here are some sample templates to consider adopting. Simply copy and paste as needed. (Thank you, alanking!)
This article is under development.
Kudos to o2smartphone who published his findings in this discussion thread on the forum, as well as other contributors in that thread.
If you have some time, please contribute to this article by adding screenshots.
