Fix Wikipedia, add Facebook to the ASUS Eee Linux PC

David M Williams
Wednesday, 30 January 2008 16:31

Opinion and Analysis

Now you're familiar with simpleui.rc and its basic format there's no end to what you can do. Why stop with Wikipedia? Why not make an icon for popular Web 2.0 social site, Facebook? Here's what to do.

First find a suitable icon; there's one at http://www.pheryx.com/images/icons/facebook.png which will do nicely. Download this and save it into your home directory.

You can move the icon into the right spot and edit simpleui.rc again with these two commands

sudo mv facebook.png /opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher
kate ~/.AsusLauncher/simpleui.rc

Find the entry for Wikipedia; move to the white space above the opening parcel tag and enter these lines

<parcel simplecat=”Internet” extraargs=”/opt/firefox/firefox http://www.facebook.com”
  icon=”facebook.png”
  selected_icon=”facebook.png”
  <name lang=”en”>Facebook</name>
</parcel>

All done! Save the file and check your Internet tab; the Facebook icon may already be showing. At worst, restart your Eee and then you will see it.

In this exact same way you can add shortcuts to all your favourite web sites as well as shortcut icons for any Linux application – not just web sites – that you like. The most complex part is purely just finding suitable icons!

One definite must is to add your own Webmail providers to the Webmail folder; by default the Eee gives links to popular sites Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL. You can add your own above or below these. You don't even need to find an icon because the same envelope icon as used for the other Webmail sites will do fine. The lines to add follow just the same format as above

<parcel simplecat="Internet/WebMail" extraargs="/opt/firefox/firefox http://webmail.exetel.com.au"
  icon="webmail_norm.png"
  selected_icon="webmail_hi.png" >
  <name lang="en">Exetel</name>
</parcel>

Where, of course, you should add your own ISP's name and Webmail URL.

Give it a go, and be sure to experiment. You know all you need to completely tailor the launcher on your ASUS Eee to reflect your own specific needs. Move the Favorites tab to the front, reorder the icons, add links to MySpace, ITWire and your other top sites. Install some new programs – like ever-popular graphics tool, The Gimp – and then add shortcut icons to them.

At the end of the day the only limit to what you can achieve is purely that which you can imagine. By taking control of the launcher you will add greater versatility and usability to the Eee, combining its ultra-portability with instant access to everything you need.