The Desktop

Now that I have pretty much decided on which way RevPup is going, it's time to decide either on a window manager or a desktop environment. Ice is a window manager while xfce is a complete environment. So far I have been doing two builds at once. One with icewm and the other with xfce. Icewm, for me at least, is much more difficult to configure the way that I want it than xfce.

So I went with xfce 4.2.3.2 full.pup. It installed very easily and was very straightforward to configure. First after installation, I went to the menu editor and hid each entry that was not in Revpup by simply checking the hide box. That way if I later decide to install any of those missing apps all I have to do is go in and uncheck the box so that it appears in the menu. When I was finished the menu was exactly the same as what was actually installed in the system.

Now for some eye-candy. Xfce-look.org is a great place to go to make xfce your own. Found a great looking wallpaper to download. Then I brought up the settings window and clicked on "desktop" and changed the wallpaper. Next I downloaded several themes and installed them in /user/share/themes. Went back to the settings window and under "user interface" the newly installed themes were waiting to be tested. After trying all of them I settled on three. Went back to the /user /share/themes folder, right clicked on the unwanted ones and deleted them. Next the panel needed to be larger. Settings window again was very handy. Went to "panel" and made it somewhat larger. The panel icons needed to be nicer, so I used 2.15 CE and saved some better looking icons to a thumb drive. Went back to RevPup and put them in the /user/share/midi-icons folder. Right clicked on the panel and replace all of the default icons and moved the settings and power-off buttons to the left side of the panel. This gave the panel a more of a uniform look.

So now I wanted to share my creation, so I started up mtpaint screen-capture. To my surprise nothing happened. After some searching, I discovered that even though it was in the ipup core, the scripts were missing. Again 2.15 CE was my source for the scripts. After copying them to the proper folders, I thought that I was all set. The menu editor needed a command and I had no idea what it was. After visiting the Puppy Forum I had the command and put it in the menu editor. Now when I clicked on the mtpaint screen-capture it actually worked.

Earlier today I posted a couple of screen shots of the RevPup desktop on the Puppy Forum. Check it out and see what you think.

Now that the desktop is all done it's time to install all of the apps that I want into RevPup which is where the next installment will take us.