How to get a Full Desktop in Asus’ eeePC

Mine is a virgin install fresh out of the box and from this point I will explain how to get the Full Desktop working, rather than just the simple mode.

  1. Power on and boot into Simple Mode
  2. First you need to get access to a terminal by enabling the “start menu”, to do that I used user o2smartphone’s guide
    1. Fire up the File Manager in Work Tab
    2. Look inside the View Menu, tick “Show Hidden Files” and “Show All File Systems”
    3. In the left pane, click on My Home, create a hidden folder .icewm
    4. In the left pane, go down from All File Systems to /etc/X11/icewm
    5. In the right pane, ctrl-A to select all files, ctrl-C to copy
    6. In the left pane, select My Home, .icewm and do a ctrl-V to paste.
    7. Right click on the file “preferences”, choose open with -> text editor.
    8. Find the line “TaskBarShowStartMenu”, change the value.
    9. Save the file and restart.
  3. Now that you have a neat little start menu, you will ALWAYS have that even in Simple Mode.
  4. Now use the start menu to run “Terminal” or “Xterm”. I think they are the same thing. I used “Terminal”.
  5. You are going to need root access in the shell so type “sudo bash” and hit enter. This will give you a red prompt that indicates that you are root. Be VERY careful while you are the root user. As root you can delete vital system files and ruin the Linux install.
  6. Now that you are root you can use apt-get to install a few important packages. None of the packages from Asus are “signed” for some reason and you will have to select yes when you get the “are you sure…” messages.
    1. type: “apt-get update” and hot enter to make sure you get the latest repository information.
    2. Now install “kicker” with “apt-get install kicker” and hit enter. (suggested by “Ant” our form admin)
    3. Type “exit” twice to close the terminal and then reboot, you will notice that in the shutdown dialog you may now see “Full Desktop”. Don’t bother with that yet, as it won’t work.
    4. A reboot may not even be required, but I fumbled through this and this is how I did it.
    5. Rebooted, run the “Terminal” again and then in the terminal type “sudo bash” to gain root.
    6. Type: “apt-get install ksmserver” and it will do it’s thing. (suggested by “oinker” in the forums)
    7. You should now be able to use the shutdown menu to select “Full Desktop”, but mine ran kinda strange until I did a full reboot, back into simple mode, shutdown to “Full Desktop”, and it loaded wonderfully.

Hope this is a useful write up. Thanks to everyone who worked hard to try and figure this out.

Oh and lastly, every time you book up your Eee, it will always start in simple mode, you then will have to use the “Shutdown” dialog to go to “Full Desktop”.

Taken from here.

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