Adding Help to Icons

Modify the control you created earlier in Spider.fp to read as follows (you are adding a HELP_STRING configuration property):

CONTROL Spider

{

  CONTAINER_NAME        Games

  CONTAINER_TYPE        SUBPANEL

  LABEL                 Spider

  ICON                  redhat_folder

  PUSH_ACTION           Spider

  PUSH_RECALL           true

   HELP_STRING  Linux: What to drive.



}

Restart the desktop, go to the Spider control, and bring up the menu by right-clicking it. Select the Help option. The Help Viewer will appear, displaying the text you supplied in the control definition.

The Help Viewer can also be passed directives on what topic to bring up in an existing help file. If you take another look at the FrontPanel definition in the main.fp file you created earlier, you can see an example:

PANEL FrontPanel

{

  DISPLAY_HANDLES        True

  DISPLAY_MENU           True

  DISPLAY_MINIMIZE       True

  CONTROL_BEHAVIOR       single_click

  DISPLAY_CONTROL_LABELS False

  HELP_TOPIC             FPOnItemFrontPanel

  HELP_VOLUME            FPanel

SUBPANEL_UNPOST          False

}

The two help directives, HELP_TOPIC and HELP_VOLUME, tell the desktop the name of the topic and the file that contains it in $CDEROOT/appconfig/help/C. This is good to know when you are modifying default icons. Again, for more information, see the manual pages included in the TEDman RPM.

Help Topics

The 18 help volumes included with the CDE contain a wealth of information useful for novice and advanced users and remove the need for anything more than the most basic of hard-copy manuals. They can be broken down into the following categories:

• Novice Help—Volumes such as "Introducing the Desktop," "Desktop Help System," and "File Manager" introduce the desktop to beginning users. They include basic topics such as how to use the mouse to more advanced operations such as managing files.
• Advanced Help—These volumes cover advanced topics such as creating and deleting actions, configuring the desktop for a network, customizing the Graphical Workspace Manager, and customizing the Front Panel, among many others.
• Application Help—Each desktop application, such as the Calendar, the Application Manager, DT Terminal, and the Style Manager, has a help volume.

Almost all the help volumes have a reference section that displays the volume's contents in the format of a keyword and topic index, so you can quickly navigate within a topic without using the index window.

Summary

This chapter presents an overview to the TriTeal Network Desktop for Linux that is distributed by Red Hat Software. The desktop is an implementation of the Common Desktop Environment.

The CDE environment provides users with an easy-to-use, consistent, and stable interface, with all the amenities offered by commercial operating systems, such as drag and drop for files and printing, online context-sensitive help, and graphical desktop tools for reading mail, editing files, and even managing a schedule.

This chapter provides information on the following:

• The history of the CDE
• The installation of the CDE, using Red Hat's RPM system
• The initial CDE login process and use of several applications included with the desktop
• Customizing the CDE environment by using the Style Manager, making simple changes to the Front Panel, and altering the configuration files to make advanced changes
• The advanced help system provided with the CDE

The CDE, and TriTeal's version in particular, offers a lot more to UNIX systems than any one chapter can cover. With it, administrators can very easily provide a seamless environment to users of not only different workstations, but workstations running different versions of UNIX. They can also apply the sort of configuration changes discussed here to entire networks by making changes in one location, which not only makes performing the change easier, but also simplifies the change management process.

The CDE is one of the many mainstream commercial products available for Linux. This availability is yet another positive sign that Linux is finally receiving the acceptance that it deserves in the commercial arena.