Common Desktop EnvironmentSome contributionsby Antonis Tsolomitis |
Why CDE ? We are not in
the nineties anymore... Because it is fast and will not make modern hardware slow like computers of the nineties. I expect that investment on modern hardware is followed by faster desktop response. Unfortunately this is most often not the case. But it is with CDE. CDE can be downloaded and installed from it's sourceforge page under the GPL2 license. Is it usable as a modern desktop? Where are my popular apps? Yes it is if you make some adjustments. About the apps, check first this screenshot. If you want to have these apps installed on CDE get my desktop_approots.tgz and do (as root) mv desktop_approots.tgz /etc/ tar -xzvf desktop_approots.tgz cd desktop_approots sh integrate_all_apps.sh logout and login back again. Click on the Application Manager (third icon from the right end of the panel). Now you can populate the panel's submenus with apps by dragging them from the Application Manager to the "Install Icon" entry on the subpanels. If you do not want all my app groups you can de-integrate them. Say you do not want the XXXX group. Do as root: cd /etc/desktop_approots/XXXX/ sh deintegrateXXXX.sh logout and login. |
Table of contentsWhy CDE ? We are not in the nineties
anymore...
Is it usable as a modern desktop? Where are my popular apps? Mouse scroll Save more lines in Terminal Window Focus Policy Click to raise Sound control Can I add menu items to the root menu? How to deal with USB drives CDs etc How to manage ethernet and wifi networks? Configure DtLogin Non CDE applications Internationalization Fonts Keyboard Where is the keyboard indicator? Can I have menus in my language? LTSP Fixing the mouse cursor at login Fonts in LTSP Mount remote media |
In LTSP the lightdm login manager expects that the desktop sets the default root cursor (the mouse pointer). Since CDE does not do this, the cursor stays in the "busy" state with a rotating icon when the cursor is on the background image. To fix this, add the following line in your $HOME/.dt/sessions/sessionetc file (and make sure this file is executable):
and restart the session.
We install the fonts we are aliasing to and the fonts.alias,
in the choot environment.
We assume that the chroot tree is an i386 one. Otherwise replace i386
with amd64 below.
For Ubuntu and using the default font aliases that point to mscore
fonts, we do:
Modern systems do not have an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Instead the configuration is placed in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/
create here a file named 99-cde.conf (on old systems xorg.conf) with contents:
where the C above can be changed to your language if its is supported (check the contents of /usr/dt/config/xfonts/)
For Greek we also need the "hellas" fonts (see installation of these fonts above) so this file should be:Having root priviledges we recreate the ltsp image:
Now CDE should load properly on the thin clients (provided that your fonts.alias are tested to work on a standalone system).
We take advantage of the capabilities of the CDE panel's
controls to watch for a file, in order to get notified that a usb key
has been mounted and easily navigate to the correct directory.
First create the file
(or use your language instead of C) with contents:
You obviously need the icons stated above. Get them from here and put the icons in
When a usb key is inserted in the thinclient, the arrow on the
HOME subpanel becomes yellow. Thus you get notified that the state of
the usb control inside the subpanel has changed. Opening the subpanel
you may check the the icon also has changed, a yellow vertical bar has
appearred to the left of the icon, and clicking on it Dtfile opens in
/media/$USER location.
You may see the screenshots here and here