Idesk
Idesk is a simple program for putting icons on your X desktop. It can also manage your wallpaper with a built in changer similar to that found in Windows 7.
Installation
Install idesk from the official repositories, then set up in your home directory:
$ mkdir ~/.idesktop $ cp /usr/share/idesk/dot.ideskrc ~/.ideskrc
optional:
$ cp /usr/share/idesk/default.lnk ~/.idesktop/
(the default icon just runs Xdialog to display a little message but can be used as a template)
Configuration
The idesk package doesn't come with a man page, but it does come with a readme file: /usr/share/idesk/README
. There's also documentation on SourceForge.net, even though most of the options are self-explanatory.
Background options
If you're using another program for setting wallpaper (such as feh) the defaults will work fine (you may want to set Background.File
and Background.Source
to "/" to silence the error messages).
Background.Source
seems to take predence over Background.File
; however, it is ignored if Background.Delay
is set to 0.
Supported wallpaper formats include JPEG, PNG, GIF, and XPM.
Icons
Idesk looks in ~/.idesktop
for files which names end with .lnk
for icons. Each file should define one icon (if you attempt to define a second icon is will be silently ignored). Aside from ending with .lnk
, the files' names are not important.
Example for Chromium:
chromium.lnk
table Icon Caption: Chromium ToolTip.Caption: Google's OSS Web Browser Icon: /usr/share/icons/hicolor/32x32/apps/chromium.png Width: 32 Height: 32 X: 977 Y: 369 Command[0]: chromium end
Width
and Height
should match the actual dimensions of the icon. X
and Y
will be modified by idesk to reflect the icon's actual position.
- Most system icons can be found in the following locations:
/usr/share/icons/hicolor
and/usr/share/icons/gnome
. - If you are wondering which size to use for your icons, 48x48 is a decent standard size for desktop icons.
Idesktool
The idesk-extrasAUR package provides a graphical configuration tool for Idesk. It can be started by running the idesktool
command.
Issues
I've noticed that icons seem to show the contents of semi-transparent urxvt windows that are on other desktops... I'm not sure it this's the fault of idesk, urxvt, OpenBox, or xcompmgr. It's not that irritating, so I do not plan to look into it, but it is odd... --Solarshado 01:09, 3 November 2010 (EDT)