Friday, November 30, 2007

Enabling the Startmenu on the EEE (default OS)

This will show you how to enable to startmenu on the linux OS that ships on your EEE pc.


Remove the quotes when typing in the commands
  1. Open a terminal window by pressing CTRL+ALT+T on your keyboard.
  2. Inside the terminal window type "mkdir ~/.icewm" and press enter.
  3. Inside the terminal window type "copy /etc/X11/icewm/preferences /home/user/.icewm" and press enter.
  4. Inside the terminal window type "cd .icewm" and press enter.
  5. Inside the terminal window type "nano preferences" and press enter.


Now you should be looking at the preferences file you copied at the beginning of this tutorial.


Using your cursor key (down arrow) navigate to the line that says "TaskBarShowStartMenu=0" and change the 0 to a 1. It should look like the screen shot below.


Press CTRL+X and then press Y then ENTER to save.


That's it your done, press CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE and X will restart with your new startmenu.

Information for this tutorial was obtained from http://wiki.eeeuser.com/

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey, for some reason i cant actually press the ~ key on my keyboard...is this something common? maybe my eee is stuffed! just bought it :(

Nick said...

I'm not a linux guru but the key isn't working for whatever reasons couldn't just just copy and paste the ~ symbol from another window?

Anonymous said...

@anon..

Change your keyboard layout to English UK. That should fix your problem.

Jason said...
This post has been removed by the author.
Jason said...

A slightly quicker and more concise way to do this is open the terminal as above and then type or copy/paste the following into the shell:

mkdir /home/user/.icewm
cd /home/user/.icewm
cp /etc/X11/icewm/preferences .
sed -i'-backup'
-e's/TaskBarShowStartMenu=0/TaskBarShowStartMenu=1/' preferences

NB the sed command should all be one line, from the word "sed" to the word "preferences" with a space before "preferences" and the "-e".
Unfortunately I can't persuade the Blogger comments form to accept a pre or code tag, or respect html non breaking spaces to display the sed command properly.
Then ctrl-alt-backspace to restart X.
Voila!

Anonymous said...

can we have a picture to see wot the new menu looks like :D

cheers

Anonymous said...

hello, just happenned to read your posts,
thanks jason..it worked.
i changed my keyboard 1st at the settings, personalization to eng-uk, thank entered the commands you said.. and indeed, viola, got the start button!
thankz a zillion