Add an eee pc start menu

For geeks, the eee pc leaves off a couple vital utilities from its user interface. Namely a terminal and a text editor. Now you can get to a terminal by typing Cntl-Alt-t or by launching one from the eee File manager. But the built in terminal uses a very small font and does not seem to be configurable. The file manager uses KDE's konsole, which works great, but I need a quicker way to get to it.

After searching around I bit, I discovered you can add a start menu to the eee's user interface. This seems to be the easiest and most unobtrusive way to add some simple customization to the eee. The steps are described on the LinuxOSS blog. Basically they are

1. Open a terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T


2. Type �sudo bash� to get root access


3. Create a hidden folder by typing: mkdir /home/user/.icewm


4. Copy a config file by typing: cp /etc/X11/icewm/preferences /home/user/.icewm/


5. Copy a sample menu so you have something to start with: cp /etc/X11/icewm/menu /home/user/.icewm/


6. Type: vi /home/user/.icewm/preferences to edit the file. If you don't know how to use vi, you should learn to. :)


7. Scroll down until you find �TaskBarShowStartMenu,� and change the 0 to 1


8. Next time you reboot or restart your X server by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Backspace you will have a shiny new start menu.

Now you can edit the /home/user/.icewm/menu file and customize the menu. The basic structure for each menu item is: prog �title� icon_name program_path. So to add the Konquerer text editor, I would add a line: prog �Text Editor� kwrite /usr/bin/kwrite. Voila! I know have a link to the kwrite editor on the start menu.

Icon Location

The first question I had after add a few test entries was, where do you get the icons for your applications? It must be getting a kwrite icon from somemplace? By default, the eee looks for icons in the /usr/share/pixmaps directory. If you navigate there you will see a number of icons. You can reuse these for most of your applications. In addition, more icons can be found at /opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher, but you will need to put in the full path icons in this directory.