ICE WM

Both KDE and Gnome suffer from NFS locking issues when the same user account is simultaneously running multiple sessions. To avoid these problems, you must use either the Ice window manger or Xfce. Ice is a very simplistic but fast and reliable window manager, especially when working on multiple computers using the same account. Xfce provides more desktop functionality, but is just as fast. For more information about Xfce see XfceWM.

For additional notes on running multiple sessions at once, please see MultipleSessions.

To set Ice as your default Window Manager from the CLASSE SL6 Linux desktop graphical login screen:

• Click on your username from the list of users.
  • If your username is not in the list, click on "Other...", enter your username and then click "Log In".
• A menu will appear directly underneath and at the bottom of the monitor with the name of the current Window Manager (e.g. GNOME).
• Then click on GNOME and KDE and Ice will appear in the list - select Ice
• login as usual
• if prompted, you can specify "Make Default" to login using Ice from now on

To set Ice as your default Window Manager from the CLASSE Scientific Linux 7 (SL7) Linux desktop graphical login screen, please see Setting Default Window Manager wiki

Customizing Ice

Menu

To customize the ICE menu seen in the bottom-left corner of the toolbar (or when right-clicking anywhere on the desktop), edit the file ~/.icewm/menu

Below are the contents of the initial ~/.icewm/menu file, which is self documenting. The Web page referenced in the file (http://www.icewm.org/FAQ/IceWM-FAQ-4.html) contains instructions for modifying the toolbar and other options.

# This is your IceWM  menu definition file.
# It overrides /usr/share/icewm/menu.
# See http://www.icewm.org/FAQ/IceWM-FAQ-4.html for more information.
#
# Syntax:
# prog "name in menu" icon apptorun -options
# Icons (without an absolute path)
#  will be searched for in ~/.icewm/icons and /usr/share/icewm/icons
#
prog "open ~bin" /usr/share/pixmaps/gnome-folder.png konqueror ~/bin
prog xterm xterm xterm
prog Firefox firefox firefox
prog XChat xchat xchat
prog Gaim gaim gaim
separator
prog Emacs emacs emacs
prog NEdit nedit nedit
prog OpenOffice2 soffice ooffice2

Workspaces

You can change the names of the different workspaces (initially "1," "2," "3," and "4") by editing the "WorkspaceNames" line of ~/.icewm/preferences. For example:

WorkspaceNames=" VMS ", " Linux ", " Browse ", " Else "

See also: X2Go