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Topic: Lost MyDSL desktop

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Fuzzhead

Group: Members
Posts: 14
Joined: May 2005

Posted: June 01 2005,01:06

I lost the MyDSL desktop, and would like to use that instead of the fluxbox menu and it's stuff. How do I restore the original desktop/shortcuts/menus etc?

Thanks,
Fuzzhead
=8^)

mikshaw

Group: Members
Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004

Posted: June 01 2005,03:05

What do you mean by "lost"?
What do you mean by "myDSL desktop"? The desktop in DSL is built of applications from different sources...
fluxbox (window manager, menu, toolbar)
xtdesk (icons)
a few dockapps (those little programs in the right side of the screen)

If you can explain a bit more about what you want on your desktop, we can better help you.

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http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html

Fuzzhead

Group: Members
Posts: 14
Joined: May 2005

Posted: June 01 2005,13:23

When I installed DSL onto my HDD, there was a GUI with many icons, and a couple of docked apps. The wallpaper was the penguin/business card logo on it, and when I right-clicked I was presented with a robust menu of applications/tasks.

During boot-up one time, the desktop reset it self to a plain tan background, and the right-click on desktop menu said, Fluxbox, xTerm, Restart, Exit. The icons were present. The window on the right side showing stats was there, and the 'toolbar' at the bottom was there.

I want to reclaim the original desktop, specifically the menu items. I don't know Linux very well, and where/how to launch these apps via the command-line, and found the menus very helpful. How do I re-instate the original desktop configuration?

Thanks,
Michael

mikshaw

Group: Members
Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004

Posted: June 01 2005,15:37

The menu thingy has been seen many times. It's a result of either a missing menu or fluxbox not properly loading the menu...usually the latter.
Look into /home/dsl/.fluxbox/init for a line like this:
session.menuFile: /path/to/menu
Make sure that menu file exists and is readable. If the menu file is missing, you can replace it with the one in /etc/skel/.fluxbox

If the menu file itself is ok, then you are probably seeing a fluxbox bug which has never been fixed even in the latest version. Apparently fluxbox does not always successfully read the menu file when it starts up, and you are left with the built-in menu which has those 3 items. Try clicking on "restart" to reload fluxbox and hopefully return the menu. Personally i've seen this so often (about 20-30% of the time) that i've added a hotkey to use the "reconfigure" fluxbox command (could be "reconfig" in fluxbox stable). When the menu doesn't show I press the hotkey, forcing fluxbox to reread its configuration files.

Once the menu is visible again, you can change most other things through the "desktop" submenu, including your plain tan background.

If your desktop icons are missing, you may have a faulty icon file in /home/dsl/.xtdesktop. Any *.lnk file which points to the wrong image file may cause the icon program (xtdesk) to crash/shutdown. Another thing is that maybe X is set up slightly different for harddrive installs...I can't say from experience. In a liveCD/frugal setup, icons and dockapps are started with the /usr/bin/enhance script. This script is called when you start X, from /home/dsl.xinitrc

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http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html

3 replies since June 01 2005,01:06

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