Re: KDE question about panel icons
Mark Wagnon <mwagnon1@home.com> writes:
> I figured out a way to get it to work, but it's kind of a PITA. I
> have to log in as root, fire up KDE, then use the menu editor to
> assign icons for each application that isn't a KDE app, or just
> doesn't have an icon associated with it.
>
Mark,
I'm afraid I misunderstood you. I thought you had problems adding icons to
the panel at all. If I understand you correctly now, you want to /change/
the icons for programs you add to the panel. Then everything makes sense :).
KDE stores its information on apps in files called *.kdelnk . There are two
places where those kdelnk that appear in your K-Menu are stored.
$KDEDIR/share/applnk for the system-wide settings and ~/.kde/share/applnk
for the personal settings for each user. In the K-Menu, the system-wide
apps are displayed on top, then you have an entry "personal" which contains
your personal apps. If you don´t have this entry, you simply have not
created any personal apps. If you use Menuedit (I have not looked at it much,
I used to move around those *.kdelnk from the command line :)), you have your
personal entries on the left hand side, the system wide entries on the right
hand side and greyed out.
When you try to change the settings for a system-wide app, you try to edit
its *.kdelnk-file in $KDEDIR/share/applnk. Normal users should not have
write permission to this dir.
> I find it strange that some programs already have icons (emacs,
> vim, gv) and others don't. I realize that those I mentioned are
> fairly common, but I would guess that xterm and rxvt are too, and
> should have icons assigned to them automagically.
>
No idea why that is so, either.
> I don't know if it's a flaw with KDE or is the packages are
> buggy.
>
Well, the flaw might be that locating the information for this whole thing
in the docs is not that easy. IIRC, it is all explained in the KFM-handbook.
You can find this in any KFM-window : Help -> contents.
> I guess I can live with my little work-around for the time being.
> I guess it's a good thing that the panel isn't very large and
> wont hold more than 10 or so apps at my desktop's current
> resolution :)
Here is an other workaround for you : If you use Menuedit, right-click the
app you want and select "copy". Then open your personal entries (left-hand
side, remember?) and paste it there. Then you can edit its properties.
After you saved your changes (and maybe restarted KPanel? I'm not sure.),
you should find it under the entry "Personal". Add it to KPanel from there.
Oh, btw. I prefer the "tiny" setting for KPanel. The icons don´t look as
neat (and with the upcoming release of the new 1.1.2 or 1.2 or whatever
they decide to call it the are supposed to look /much/ neater than now),
but it takes up much less screen and I can fit more icons. You can get
/almost/ the same effect by using auto-hide on the panel, but I would not
want to do without my docked apps visible all the time.
Ok, that's a long post. Hope I could help a little.
bye
Jerry
--
Just being paranoid does not mean they´re *not* out to get you...
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