Get the Linux desktop you always wanted in 10 easy steps!

I am having a problem with the xcfe panel (ie the taskbar). When I position it at the top of the screen it insits on quadrupling its height. It is nolonger one icon high, but takes up half the screen! Can I fix this, I would love my system to be more mac like.

 

I think that's because you are using the xfce4-panel modified by linpus. You can check the name with this command in a terminal:
ps ax | grep panel

The non-modified one is called xfce4-panel.old I think (check in /usr/bin:

in a terminal
cd /usr/bin
ls xfce4-panel*

)

Hope it helps
TheTilde

 

Hey, big thanks to everyone who has posted in this thread! Got my desktop just as i wanted :mrgreen:

 

I simply cannot thank you enough!

You are my god for the day.

Moejoe

 

First of all my compliments for this great forum and topic!

I followed every step and even me, a linux noob, made it. There is only one big but!
It's very strange, but it seem I am not able to create shortcuts. So basically I get stuck at point 9. I find the applications map.
I resize the screen so a part of the desktop is visible and drag the icons to the desktop as suggested. At the moment there appears no shortcut/icon.
And after a reboot I still dont have a shortcut/icon.

Thanks in advance.

 

be shure the thunar window is on the right side and dragging the icons to the left.

 

i do that all the time, it is not working.
i only open thunar and drag the icons to the desktop.
what is meant with ~desktop?

 

Hi i followed this tutorial up to step 5 the reboot section and now i can't do anything. alt + F2 wont bring up the run dialogue and there are no icons to get anything. Am i going to have to do a system restore?

Seen the same problem on the second page, i must have done a typo

 

ok i've managed to get the recovery cd on to an mp3 player, it's the only thing that i could find that was big enough to hold the recovery, but now when i boot it i have a completely black screen with a little white bar flashing at the top. Is this because i'm trying to boot it from an mp3 player and not a memory stick?

 

FAO Grooving tony

Hello Tony, you may not be away that the aspire One series can not use USB drives greater than 4GB, is the mp3 player you are using of greater capacity?, I had the same problem when using a 8GB USB drive, I spoke to the ACER support team and was informed of the USB size limit and recommended I get myself a 2Gb unit, so I nipped out to my local Tesco’s and bought one (£5) after running the recovery disc again and following the instructions to create a bootable USB Stick it worked fine.
Hope this helps.

 

well i have successfully used a 250GB usb harddrive to do a full as is backup of my linpus AAO using macles easybackup tool. I also use this drive to store files to exchange with windows computers as long as the files do not exceed 4gb everything is fine

mike46

 

Hi im new to all this as im sure you will gather by my question.

I have followed the above steps and i must say its worked brilliantly and is defiantly near idiot proof however when i do REBOOT it goes back to the 4 panel display unitl i uncheck and check the "allow xfce to manage desktop box" were it then come back.. how do i get it to stay as i intend.

iv tried to use the sudo cp line but it returns a error message saying that the root or the file cannot be found or something. Any help would be greatly appreciated if you need any more info please message.

Thanks, Josh

 

hi
can you post the exact line you want to execute and the exact error message?

 

I want to apologize if this has been asked before, but i searched to no avail. So I'm having trouble on step number 8; which is writing the new file xcdesktoprc. As with all the other instructions, i followed it to a tee, copied and pasted what i could, but when i try to save the file, it claims i can't open that file to write. I'm certain I'm logged in as a root user.

I also had trouble moving the photo chosen to the backdrops directory. It doesn't recognize /Pictures/xkcdwallpaper2.png as a directory. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Just wanted to say a big thank you for posting such a great guide. I'm a total newbie (still dont fully understand Linux), was terrified about doing this, but followed it to the letter and i'm pleased as punch with the outcome!

Here's my screenshot:

 

Is this safa mod? What I do if I have proplem with this?
Working desktop swicher after that?

 

Just to add my thanks - my Aspire One now feels like a proper laptop! Everything works fine including USB devices.

Like others I had slight problem after the first reboot finding firefox so I could get back to these instructions, but otherwise worked like a dream

 

Thanks!... your post was very usefull to me!

 

Very nice!!!

 

Hi
I really want to follow the steps but I have problems with the first few steps.
When I press Alt F2 nothing comes up and when I search on my laptop there is absolutely nothing called terminal =( I need help. I hate not being able to personalise my things.