/usr/share/doc/tkdesk/tkdesk-doc/guide-10.html

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
 <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="LinuxDoc-Tools 0.9.20">
 <TITLE>TkDesk User's Guide: Frequently Asked Questions </TITLE>
 <LINK HREF="guide-11.html" REL=next>
 <LINK HREF="guide-9.html" REL=previous>
 <LINK HREF="guide.html#toc10" REL=contents>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<A HREF="guide-11.html">Next</A>
<A HREF="guide-9.html">Previous</A>
<A HREF="guide.html#toc10">Contents</A>
<HR>
<H2><A NAME="s10">10.</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10">Frequently Asked Questions </A></H2>



<H2><A NAME="apppos"></A> <A NAME="ss10.1">10.1</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.1">How can I change the position of the application bar?</A>
</H2>


<P>The appbar should have a &quot;handle&quot; at the
upper or left edge that can be used to drag the appbar around the
screen by just pressing the left mouse button over it.</P>
<P>You can also drag the application bar around simply by holding down the
Alt- or Meta-key and simultaneously pressing the left mouse button
over the application bar. You can also invoke the
&quot;Move...&quot; entry from the desk-button's popup menu to do
the same without having to press Alt/Meta.</P>
<P>The application-bar configuration file, &quot;AppBar&quot;, allows you
to set a variable named tkdesk(appbar,wm_managed) which can be used to have
the apllication bar managed by the window manager, although this is
usually not necessary.</P>

<H2><A NAME="ss10.2">10.2</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.2">Can I have transparent icons?</A>
</H2>


<P>No, but have a look at the answer to the next question.  As far as I
know to have transparent icons in X you need to make use of X11's
SHAPE extension.  Now as raw X programming is something only for the
very brave, I didn't look into this any deeper yet.  Any takers?</P>

<H2><A NAME="ss10.3">10.3</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.3">How can I change the background colour of the icons and desk items?</A>
</H2>


<P>The background colour of icons used when the window manager iconifies
a window can be set in the configuration file "System". The variable
you are looking for is tkdesk(color,icon_background). By setting this
variable to the same colour as your root window you can achieve the
effect of transparent icons. You can define the colour either as a
normal name (such as "grey", "blue") or in the form #rrggbb.</P>

<H2><A NAME="ss10.4">10.4</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.4">How can I have a different set of desk items on each virtual screen? </A>
</H2>



<H3>FVWM and similar or derived window managers</H3>


<P>First, you have to set the variable
<CODE>tkdesk(desk_items,wm_managed)</CODE> in the System config file to 1.
Then you have to configure fvwm to not decorate windows of class
<CODE>dsk_DeskItem</CODE>. For instance:
<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
<PRE>
Style "dsk_DeskItem"    NoTitle, NoHandles, WindowListSkip, BorderWidth 0
</PRE>
</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>
</P>

<H3>CDE window manager</H3>


<P>As for FVWM, you first have to set the variable
<CODE>tkdesk(desk_items,wm_managed)</CODE> in the System config file to 1.
To tell the CDE window manager (dtwm) to not decorate desk items you
have to add the following line to either the file Dtwm or .Xdefaults
in your home directory, and then restart dtwm:
<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
<PRE>
Dtwm*dsk_DeskItem*clientDecoration:  none
</PRE>
</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>
</P>

<H2><A NAME="ss10.5">10.5</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.5">How do I configure FVWM mini-icons for TkDesk?</A>
</H2>

<P>For fvwm95's Style command (like fvwm2 from which it comes) you can
use a variety of things to identify a tkdesk window - you don't have
to use the name only; you can also use the window's class name or
resource string.  To find out what the window class and resource
string are for a certain type of tkdesk window, use the FvwmIdent
module (if you use Debian, this will be under the Window
Managers->Modules menu; if you're using the default fvwm95rc that
comes with the fvwm95 distribution, this will be under the
Programs->Modules menu; I don't know about others).</P>
<P>Anyway, FvwmIdent tells me that the window opened by tkDesk's "Open
Browser..." menu has a class name of dsk_FileViewer, so I open the
FvwmConsole (or FvwmTalk) module, and enter the commands:</P>
<P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
<PRE>
Style dsk_FileViewer TitleIcon mini-filemgr.xpm
Recapture
</PRE>
</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>
</P>
<P>Then the browser window appears with the appropriate icon.  To get the 
window opened by the "Open Directory..." menu, use:
Style dsk_FileList TitleIcon mini-filemgr.xpm</P>
<P>(The "recapture" command is only necessary to apply the command to
windows already open; it isn't necessary in your config. file)
(Contributed by Daniel Martin, <CODE>dtm12@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu</CODE>)</P>

<H2><A NAME="ss10.6">10.6</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.6">Configuring the appbar or popup menus to execute (export foo=bar; program;) doesn't work.</A>
</H2>


<P>Yes, this is a bit tricky. What you need to do is the following:</P>
<P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
<PRE>
dsk_exec sh -c {export foo=bar; program}
</PRE>
</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>
</P>

<H2><A NAME="ss10.7">10.7</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.7">Composing characters doesn't work in TkDesk's editor.</A>
</H2>


<P>Currently you have to edit the file cb_tools/bindings.tcl in TkDesk's
library directory to make this work.  Locate the two lines containing
the word &quot;XKB&quot;; all you need to do is to comment out the
following lines by prepending a '#'.</P>

<H2><A NAME="ss10.8">10.8</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.8">TkDesk's layout seems to be screwed.  I can't get the appbar displayed anymore. </A>
</H2>


<P>TkDesk saves all layout information in the file &nbsp;/.tkdesk/_layout, so
this is the place to look for bad lines.  If in doubt you can safely
delete this file and all should be back to normal.</P>
<P>In case of the appbar not showing up you can try the following (sent by
Jochem Huhmann, joh@unidui.uni-duisburg.de):</P>
<P>
<OL>
<LI> Quit tkdesk</LI>
<LI> Open the file ".tkdesk/_layout" within your home directory with your
favorite editor</LI>
<LI> Delete the line looking like "Toplevel dsk_appbar 1 66x740+956+0"</LI>
<LI> Write the file back to disk</LI>
<LI> Restart tkdesk. It will place the AppBar according to its defaults 
now.</LI>
<LI> Place the AppBar as you like (it doesn't like horizontal layout too
much)</LI>
<LI> Do a "TkDesk/Save All Now"</LI>
</OL>
</P>

<H2><A NAME="ss10.9">10.9</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.9">On my RedHat 5.x system the appbar clock shows the wrong time. </A>
</H2>


<P>This is from Bryan Venable, spif@vousi.com:</P>
<P>This may have to do with the location of the zoneinfo directory.  For libc5
I believe it's /usr/lib/zoneinfo, whereas for glibc it'd be
/usr/share/zoneinfo.  Try making a symbolic link from whichever you have to
whichever you don't.  There is a fix to Red Hat 5.0 which has to do with
this, but in that situation the problem is with libc5 programs running on a
system "optimized" for glibc.</P>
<P>And Raul Quiroga, quiroga@cartan.math.cinvestav.mx, also has got some
advice for this:</P>
<P>Concerning the problem described below I received several suggestions.
Some allowed to get the date in the tkdesk right but an incorrect one with
the date command. Finally what I did is set the time with timeconfig to
Universal with "Hardware clock set to GMT" checked; after a reboot both
the appbar and date reported the correct time. Thanks all for your
help.</P>

<H2><A NAME="ss10.10">10.10</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.10">TkDesk complains about &quot;invalid command name wm&quot; and won't start up</A>
</H2>


<P>There seem to be two solutions to this problem: One is if you're
running on a RedHad Linux 5.x system, the libc5 that's packaged and
installed in /lib may be too old a version.  If <CODE>ls
/lib/libc.so.5.*</CODE> on your system gives something like
<CODE>/lib/libc.so.5.3.xx</CODE> you should upgrade to at least 5.4.20.  I
think you can get a newer version of libc from sunsite.unc.edu in
/pub/Linux/GCC.</P>
<P>The other solution that should always work is to do the following
(thanks to Ike Hishikawa, ike@hishikawa.f.uunet.de, for this one):</P>
<P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
<PRE>
Assuming that the tarball was unpacked under /usr/local,
open /usr/local/bin/tkdesk with your favorite editor.
At the very top of the file it should say:

  #!/bin/sh
  #-*- tcl -*- \
  PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH ;#\
  exec tkdesksh "$0" "$@"

After the 3rd line, insert two lines pointing to the location of
tcl/tk libs,  so that you get:

  #!/bin/sh
  #-*- tcl -*- \
  PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH ;#\
  export TCL_LIBRARY=/usr/local/lib/TkDesk/tcl_lib ;#\
  export TK_LIBRARY=/usr/local/lib/TkDesk/tk_lib ;#\
  exec tkdesksh "$0" "$@"

This did the trick for me :)
Hope this helps,
</PRE>
</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>
</P>

<H2><A NAME="ss10.11">10.11</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.11">I cannot launch other Tcl/Tk applications from within TkDesk</A>
</H2>

<P>Probably your version of TkDesk sets the environment variables
TK_LIBRARY and TCL_LIBRARY, which confuses other Tcl/Tk apps.
Unset these variables in the config files before the invocation of
the problematic commands, eg. replace xterm with</P>
<P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
<PRE>
        sh -c {unset TK_LIBRARY TCL_LIBRARY; xterm}
</PRE>
</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>
</P>
<P>(contributed by Christoph Dalitz, <CODE>dalitz@infotech.de</CODE>)</P>

<H2><A NAME="ss10.12">10.12</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.12">I'd like TkDesk to do this and that. How can I achieve this?</A>
</H2>


<P>The first place to start are the various configuration files of TkDesk.
These can be accessed either by the "TkDesk/Configuration" menu
of the file browser windows, or by the "Configuration" submenu of the
popup menu of the very first button of the application bar of TkDesk.</P>
<P>Since TkDesk uses Tcl as the language for its configuration, and these
configuration files are simply "source"ed, you could add any sort of
Tcl proc for instance to the configuration file "System". This proc
would then be available in every other configuration file as well.
With the set of commands provided by TkDesk, which are listed e.g.
in the configuration file "Popups", TkDesk provides a very powerful
platform for the user who knows Tcl.</P>

<H2><A NAME="ss10.13">10.13</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.13">Is there a TkDesk mailing list? </A>
</H2>


<P>There two mailing lists dedicated to TkDesk, one for discussing general
installation/usage topics (tkdesk-users) and one targeted more for
TkDesk-related development topics (tkdesk-code).  You can subscribe
to the tkdesk-users list here:
<CODE>
<A HREF="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tkdesk-users">https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tkdesk-users</A>.</CODE>
To post questions, etc., send email to <CODE>
<A HREF="mailto:tkdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net">tkdesk-users@lists.sourceforge.net</A>.</CODE></P>
<P>It you are interested in contributing to the development of TkDesk, you can
subscribe to the tkdesk-code list here:
<CODE>
<A HREF="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tkdesk-code">https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tkdesk-code</A>.</CODE>
Once you have subscribed, you can post using the address <CODE>
<A HREF="mailto:tkdesk-code@lists.sourceforge.net">tkdesk-code@lists.sourceforge.net</A>.</CODE></P>

<H2><A NAME="tcltk"></A> <A NAME="ss10.14">10.14</A> <A HREF="guide.html#toc10.14">Where can I find out more about Tcl/Tk?</A>
</H2>


<P>The official Tcl/Tk homepage is at
<CODE>
<A HREF="http://www.tcl.tk/">http://www.tcl.tk/</A></CODE>.</P>
<P>There is also a newsgroup dedicated
to Tcl/Tk: <CODE>
<A HREF="news:comp.lang.tcl">comp.lang.tcl</A></CODE>.</P>

<HR>
<A HREF="guide-11.html">Next</A>
<A HREF="guide-9.html">Previous</A>
<A HREF="guide.html#toc10">Contents</A>
</BODY>
</HTML>
tkdesk 2.0-9.1ubuntu1 / usr / share / doc / tkdesk / tkdesk-doc / guide-10.html
