Update: This penguin walks on a bed of blue screens of death!

E Frank Ball frankb at efball.com
Mon Oct 8 19:38:04 PDT 2001


On Mon, Oct 08, 2001 at 03:16:39PM -0700, Lincoln Peters wrote:
} In my most recent message, I said that I had installed wmconfig on the 
} netbooting workstation and that I would get a working "Programs" menu in 
} FVWM2 when I tried it again.  When I got back today, I found that it had the 
} "Programs" menu, but none of the GNOME of KDE programs were listed in it.  
} That's a serious problem, because I was hoping that the users would have 
} easy access to AbiWord, KOffice, Konqueror, and some other GNOME/KDE 
} programs without having to run GNOME/KDE (remember, only 64MB of RAM!).  
} Most of the other programs don't seem to measure up (imagine using Emacs to 
} write an essay for an English class), and typing the program name into an 
} XTerm is not considered easy access.

I don't consider wandering around a maze of menus easy access, but I
seem to be in the minority.  I fooled around with wmconfig a little, and
it was picking up the gnome applications (like gnumeric) and mixing them
into the various menu catagories.  It didn't find KDE stuff. 

The fvwm2rc config file (~/.fvwm2rc or /etc/X11/fvwm2/system.fvwm2rc) is
pretty easy to edit for menus.  Just add a menu section for KDE apps, it
shouldn't be too hard to find them all.

A few fvwm control panel buttons for commonly used apps would be a good
way to go, even with complete menus.  These are easy too.  See my
screenshots for examples.

Some of the fvwm2rc file is pretty cryptic, like the mouse and button
bindings, other parts are pretty readable.  RedHat throws in a ton of
garbage for some very specfic things you will probably never use.

If you want to look at what I have for some ideas I have 3 screen shots
and config files at http://efball.com/fvwm/

"arc" is my HPUX machine, which is my primary computer at work.  It's
1280x1024.  The blue box in the control panel which reads:  "Window Text
Media ..."  is a custom Agilent Sonoma County / HPUX thing with menus
for various business applications.

"yellowst" is one of the "restricted" manufacturing machine group
accounts that prevent users from getting to a command line or mail
program without logging in as themselves.  The dialog box shown is what
is brought up by clicking "xterm" to make them login as themselves.
1024x768.  Redhat 6.2

"zikzak" is my laptop.  1024x768.  Mandrake 7.1

-- 

   E Frank Ball                efball at efball.com



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