Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Mawkish · Joined: 23 May 2007 Posts: 5 Location: Manchester, England

Hello, this is my first post on here, and I have only taken the leap from Microsoft to Puppy a couple of days ago. In fact, I have only just started using linux, so please be patient with me.

I have downloaded Puppy 2.16 and have managed to install the spell checker for AbiWord and icewm. I downloaded some themes for icewm (only the .pup files could I install, the others I have no idea what to do with them, .tgz.whatever(?)). I started a couple of days ago with Puppy 2.15CE, and the taskbar was totally different. The different themes (icewm I assume) changed the appearance of the task bar dramatically, including the image on the 'start' button.

So, my question is, why on my icewm I installed on puppy 2.16 do the themes not change the start button/task bar as much? I'm confused, is there a way of manually changing the image? It is all very confusing.

I also have a CD (I've had it for a while) from Sun Microsystems with StarOffice 5.2 on it. It apparantly works with Linux, but I just can't get it to install. Can anyone offer any help with this?

Also, finally, are there any good Windows emulators? I have heard about Wine and tried to use it, but it didn't seem to run any of the programs I use (like ACT, RSOFT and Compaq Fortran). An emulator would be better, I think. Any suggestions?

Like I said, go easy on me. I'm new at this but coming of Microsoft is like coming off Crack, I suppose. I have to take things slowly.

Mawkish · Joined: 23 May 2007 Posts: 5 Location: Manchester, England

Oh yeah, please email me at keithdalby@hotmail.co.uk if you have any advice!

Thank you so much!

Pizzasgood · Posted: Wed 23 May 2007, 14:53 Post subject:

I don't think 2.16 uses IceWM at all. It uses JWM, which doesn't have as advanced theming abilities as IceWM. If you search the forum you should be able to find some dotpups of IceWM that you could install.

Once you have it installed, to install themes in a .tgz or .tar.gz file, you just extract them and put the folder in /root/.icewm/themes/. Just clicking them should let you extract, but I like to do it from the commandline:
tar -xf <file>.tar.gz

The directory /root/.icewm is hidden (it starts with a . ) so you'll have to click the "eye" button on the ROX-Filer toolbar to see it.

One issue you might have with installing an IceWM dotpup is whether it will use the XDG menus correctly. I don't think there have been any IceWM packages since Puppy officially adopted XDG and I'm not sure how the old ones will behave. I think Puppy includes the scripts and templates for IceWM, so there might only be problems if you use a dotpup that had it's own XDG system, which might conflict with Puppy's.

Mawkish · Joined: 23 May 2007 Posts: 5 Location: Manchester, England

Hey, I found a post on here about icewm:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?search_id=96709858&t=18309

It really helped, just incase anyone else wants icewm on Puppy 2.16 and their left hand doesn't know what their elbow is doing.

-Mawkish