Freakishly placed starters

[Derick Centeno]

On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 19:07, a monkey wrote:
> I mean, I want to have the properly placed starter stay where it is, 
> while the freakishly placed one gets deleted. That seems to be perfectly 
> clear.
> 
 
Thanks monkey:
Although there is a bit of monkey in all of us, whether you follow the
Dragonball/Dragonball Z/GT series or just plain genetics, and everyone
will "monkey around" at least just a wee bit sometimes at least.  Doing
anything worthwhile in Linux requires as much clarity one can muster as
a gift to others.

Now for the "fun" part.  The answer is dependent and varied according to
which desktop interface you prefer to use KDE, Gnome or something else.
Each desktop interface handles how your desktop appears completely
differently.  However as they are all open source you can and may
explore exactly how each one, in glorious detail, handles directory
structures and files! :)  That's the good news.

The bad news is that there are no rules which apply to all of these
desktop systems the same way.  For example, the Englightenment desktop
is a nice and clean example of how different they can be.

However, there is one very, very general description I can provide. 
Which I will admit readily you may have thought of yourself and
therefore may not really be any use to you actually at all.  

It comes to this.  You will have to search that desktop engine's manner
of handling application directories.  That is, look for how a desktop
system finds/locates/logs where each application (use one application as
a guide, say Gimp) is supposed to be AND THEN presents that information
to it's user.  If you can come to understand how Gimp is handled within
a desktop engine and follow how that desktop engine places Gimp in
comparison to other applications within a menu structure then you will
have begun to discover how all the other apps are arranged within that
desktop environment.

To my experience this kind of information is available to the design
team of the desktop interface, in short programmers, as opposed to
programmers who are short (couldn't resist a little joke).  Of course,
all programmers have shorts, but not all use them (forgive me, the
monkey in me is beginning to break out).  

If you are really not up to this kind of independent detailed work, you
can contact the desktop project itself.  That is, contact the people who
designed the interface of your interest or that you use and ask them
what you asked here.  You might get a direct and clear answer.  You may
also be told you are welcome to resolve the matter yourself as everyone
on the project is already busy assigned to doing other things.  This may
be expressed as inviting you to become a member of the design team
working towards the release of the next version of the desktop
interface.  In the meantime you will be learning to work as a programmer
in whatever language they use in the interface of your interest.

Depending on your skill level on handling that, it may actually be
faster to just find a desktop interface which actually satisfies you or
at least keeps hidden from you the "freakish" placement order of your
favorite applications which drives you, well... "nuts".  Enlightenment
(www.enlightenment.org) is actually very good at this.  The menu only
pops up whenever you need it and as we all know whatever the monkey
doesn't see won't annoy the monkey.  :)   Meanwhile you may find what
bothered you before to be less on your mind in the future as you get
used to how a different interface handles things.

The standard YDL 3.0 came with 3 desktop interfaces.  Linux comprises
many, many  more interfaces than that -- any and all of which can be
loaded and tweaked to work within YDL if one is seriously committed to
that desktop interface.  I wish you every success on your quest.

By the way, for clarity's sake don't bother contacting TerraSoft.  They
did not design any of the desktop interfaces.  Also keep in mind that
each desktop project may use a different language, so be prepared to
comprehend and use C,C++, php, python, java or something else.  As I
said earlier, the good news is that everything is open source in Linux.

Best wishes....