desktop icons in IceWM?

[gamblor01]

Is this possible...if so, how do I accomplish this task? Found some really sweet looking themes on IceWM and I want to use it instead of KDE, but I don't like the fact that I have NO desktop icons. I'm lazy and I don't want to have to open a terminal and type some command when I want to open a program. Let me just click it!

[Icarus]

Clicking anywhere will bring up the menu...

I have no idea how to make a desktop shortcut in IceWM, but I found the menu to be just as good (but using a laptop mouse did make this a bit of a pain for me...)

[AdaHacker]

If you're feeling adventurous, you can use ROX-Filer (http://rox.sourceforge.net) to put icons on the desktop in any window manager. It's primarily a file manager, but it includes a pinboard to hold desktop icons as well as a panel that does shortcuts and applets. Put them together with your favorite window manager and you've got a nice, light-weight desktop environment. I've been using the GTK2 version with Sawfish for a few months now and I'm very pleased with it. Screenshots at the link in my sig if you care.

[je_fro]

If you go with IceWM in slack8.1, the desktop already has icons. I haven't looked into why or how, though.

[AdaHacker]

It must be something about the particular package you installed, because Slackware 8.1 doesn't come with IceWM. It's not in the extras either, so there's not even an official package for it.

[hop-frog]

desklaunch (http://www.dreamind.de/files/desklaunch_1.1.1-1.tar.gz) is a light-weight icon program that works with most window managers.

The downside is that you have to edit a .desklaunchrc file to and write in the pixel coordinates for the icon and the location of its pixmap. I think it only supports *.xpm format.

There is also another program called "coolicon." I have not tried this out.

[gamblor01]

Ok well I tried that rox thing but it's not installing properly. I downloaded the Mandrake 9.0 packages just like it said and tried to install and this is what I get:


[root@localhost Documents]# rpm -ihv rox-1.3.6-1.i586.rpm
error: failed dependencies:
shared-mime-info >= 0.8 is needed by rox-1.3.6-1


What in the world does that mean?

[Hayl]

it means you are missing or have too low of a version of "shared-mime-info"

another desktop manager one to try is

idesk (http://linuxhelp.hn.org/idesk.php)

[AdaHacker]

Originally posted by gamblor01

[root@localhost Documents]# rpm -ihv rox-1.3.6-1.i586.rpm
error: failed dependencies:
shared-mime-info >= 0.8 is needed by rox-1.3.6-1
In order to use the development version of ROX, you need the shared MIME info database from freedesktop.org. Baically, this package is just a database of MIME types that are used for file association and so forth. The Mandrake RPM for it is avilable in the "contrib" directory of your favorite Cooker mirror. Here (ftp://sunsite.uio.no/pub/unix/Linux/Mandrake/Mandrake-devel/contrib/i586/shared-mime-info-0.9-2mdk.i586.rpm) is a link to the RPM on the primary mirror (ftp://sunsite.uio.no/pub/unix/Linux/Mandrake/Mandrake-devel/).

Once you have ROX installed, you can start the pinboard (which is what ROX calls the thing that holds desktop icons) with the command rox -p Default
If you're feeling adventurous, you can also try using ROX as a desktop environment by downloading ROX-Session (http://rox.sourceforge.net/rox_session.php3). This will set you up with a pinboard, a panel, and a few defaults. Be warned, however, that ROX-Session will overwrite your ~/.xinitrc, so you might want to back it up if you need it.

Putting icons on the desktop is done by simply by dragging a file from the ROX-Filer window onto the desktop. To set an icon for a particular file, right-click on it into the ROX-Filer window and select "Set icon." Then, just drag the image file you want to use from another ROX-FIler window and drop it in the "Set Icon" window. You can use the same method to set your desktop wallpaper, just right-click on the desktop instead.

If you're feeling really adventurous, you can also use application directories, or AppDirs, to create ROX wrappers for some of your favorite applications. A wrapper AppDirs is basically just a shell script that has custom right-click options and responds to drag-and-drop, so it can be as simple or as complex as you want. I have a few examples (http://www.cs.sunyit.edu/~geerp/rox/software.html#wrappers) on my page that range from very simple to kind of elaborate. I would also recommend checking out some of the tutorials on the ROX page (http://rox.sf.net). It might take a little getting used to, as it's very different from other file managers/desktop environments, but ROX is extremely cool and very easy to use once you get the hang of it.

[Proudest Monkey]

I recently installed vector linux it is slackware 8.1 binary compatible and its default icewm has icons, I am not quite sure how they do it check them out at http://vectorlinux.com/