icewm has no programs

[John Summerfield]

Gilboa Davara wrote:

A bit about my background, it will help you see my perspective.

I currently work at a school. I look after a network of Windows 
(including AD), Apple Mac and Linux computers.

The students use Windows and they are tied down very firmly with Windows 
group policy. They don't get popup menus, the don't get command windows 
or the run menu item, they don't get to examine the local disk's 
contents. If a computer misbehaves, I simply reinstall Windows. Or junk it.

The teachers are much like the teachers you and I had when young, 
they're mostly nice people (but able to convince students they're not), 
competent at what they do, but mostly clueless about computers. If they 
can't print, "The Internet's down," and I get a call.

If it's not straightforward when the computer's put in their hands, the 
are lost.

In a previous life, I used to be a sysprog on IBM mainframes at the 
Department of Social Security, and these days I hang out on a list for 
Linux on zSeries.

The school's a small shop, the folk on with the zSeries are from big 
shops, as DSS was then, is now.

I don't like lots of computers that need individual attention. I would 
expect that DSS and other major departments, and companies, count their 
computers in tens of thousands, big multinationals in hundreds of 
thousands. I expect that they lock down their staff as firmly as we lock 
down the students. Running around giving computers individual attention 
isn't something that scales or that they would do.


> On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 22:58 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
>> atm I have SL5 on two systems, I have IceWM on one of them. It seemed 
>> pretty quick (and I didn't see a problem with the menus), that was (in 
>> part) why I installed it on Fedora.

Ha! I didn't see a problem with the menus because there isn't a programs 
menu. However, icewm isn't what I was testing, I don't really have a 
usable system - graphics is a right mess.

> 
> Here's what I do on my VM's:
> Install the both the icewm and the icewm-xdgmenu.
> Login once. (To generate the program list.)
> Create a local startup ($HOME/.icewm/startup) file that will only
> regenerates the menus if programs.programs.autogen is N days old.
> Shazam! icewm logs in within 1 second.

Doesn't scale. Contemplate 10,000 computers and 10,000 users. Contempate 
hot desks (I want a desk, nobody's using that computer, I'll use that one).



> 
> As for SL5, I'd venture and guess that are using IceWM's built-in gnome
> and/or KDE support.

That system is likely to get nuked. If SLE{D,S} works that might get a 
go. I've ruled out FreeBSD, it apparently doesn't install on that 
system. Ubuntu LongLife is a chance.

> Sadly enough, I found that under Fedora, neither one generated
> satisfying results. (Missing applications; missing icons; etc)
> Only xdgmenu gave me the necessary flexibility I needed. (E.g. use
> custom font-sets)
> 
> ... You could try icewm-gnome (also in the repos) and see if it works
> better for you.

I removed the first, removed ~/.icewm. installed icewm-gnome, logged 
in/out a few times. No ~/.icewm. .xession-errors mentions files in the 
directory, but it never gets created and there's no error message.

There's no documentation for /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2, and no 
information on what might be good values to complete this:
[root at potoroo ~]# /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2 --help
icewm-menu-gnome2: Usage: /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2 [ --open PATH | 
--list PATH ]
[root at potoroo ~]# /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2
icewm-menu-gnome2: Usage: /usr/bin/icewm-menu-gnome2 [ --open PATH | 
--list PATH ]
[root at potoroo ~]#

Note that square brackets are ordinarily used to denote optional 
information, so according to the help info, it should do something 
useful with no operands.




-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

You cannot reply off-list:-)